Modern Times and Modern Rites

1. 1. Varieties of Li

In classical Chinese Confucian philosophy, li encompasses such things as greeting practices, dress, bodily posture, deference rules, tone of voice, diet, food etiquette, marriage and remarriage rules, funeral practices, and mourning periods.

The first thing to notice is that Western liberal cultures have norms governing all these things as well.² It might be that all cultures have rites or rituals built around some such universal events as birth, coming of age, marriage, death, and, perhaps, being in relation to the divine. It may also be natural, in some sense of the word “natural,” to create norms where order is necessary or helpful to accomplish some task, such as forming coffee lines in order to accomplish the result of first come first served. If the norm was not first come first served, but “elders first,” a different practical way of getting the customers their coffee rather than queuing would need to be in place to get all the customers coffee in the right way. But still, there would be some tendency under any normative regime towards creating a method. Notice this much might make us ask what function our rites serve? What is the intended function of our rites? Supposing we can answer in terms of what I am calling a normative contribution, or more likely, normative contributions, we might ask whether our rites, our way of doing the rites, our attentiveness to our rites, our modes of passing on the rites, and so on, are good, effective, and so on.

1. 2. Gentlepersons

In classical China, a gentleperson abides the rites. Li is necessary for being a good person, part of having a good character. But it is not sufficient (Sarkissian 2014). One also needs to be benevolent, righteous, respectful of elders, and so on. One might think of the relations among these virtues of character³ holistically. A certain kind of attentiveness revealed in how one greets others enables and is enabled by being benevolent (ren 仁) or filial (xiao 孝) (to some degree). A loving and respectful family buries its members in certain ways. In China, there are sages who know the proper rites and rituals, these exemplars model the virtues and perform the rites in the right ways. Ideally the rites and the right way(s) of doing the rites spread and then eventually are maintained/sustained in their right form. Xunzi 荀子 is most clear among the classical Ru 儒 that rites are necessary for individual and social flourishing. Li brings order (zhi 治) and it works best if it functions in a society-wide manner and is enforced if necessary by the mechanisms of state power.

1. 3. Learning the Rites

No one is born knowing the rites. But perhaps a disposition to acquire rites is innate (Hansen 1992). Either way, rites need to be learned or developed. Role modeling, especially via exemplars, elders, experts, or virtuosos who really have the rites down is one way for the newbies to acquire the rites. Presumably, the role models themselves model or modeled themselves on other experts. Perhaps they were themselves apprentices to real or imagined virtuosos, sage kings, and the like. Then there is self-cultivation. A gentleperson works at nailing the rites, getting them just right. It is in the nature of most rites that there are norms for how they are to be executed, not merely norms that say that some end should be achieved by any means whatsoever. If forks go to the left, they go to the left in the correct not haphazard way. This does not matter to finding one’s fork; it matters to whether the rite is done correctly. If Mass must be held on Sunday morning, then it is to be done on Sunday and in the way Mass is done, not rescheduled for Saturday or Monday or shortened because there is an important football game on TV. People who perform or participate in ritual practice work at getting them right. Some people are poor at handshaking—they grasp the others hand too quickly, too, and so on (Fingarette 1972). They ought to practice more; attend to feedback, largely nonverbal, about how they are doing, and so on.

Some issues emerge: Is it best, and if so why, that rites be shared widely across all members of some society or it is ok if they are shared within groups but not across? How this might work needs to be refined. The first scenario is one in which the rites are homogeneous or global; the second is one in which they are heterogeneous and local. So one dimension is homogeneity and heterogeneity.

Another dimension is expressive convergence versus cognitive convergence. Expressive convergence refers to the norm that everyone who is performing the rite, especially if performing it together, executes it in the same way. The demand is that insofar as we are going to perform this rite, we do it in the same way. If it is a song or piece of music, we use the same version, language, and score. Every culture has rites where norms of expressive convergence are expected.

Cognitive convergence occurs when the ritual practice is judged to get at the truth or, what is different, the way things are supposed to be done. In board games, like chess and Go, and in many sports, there are ways of moving pieces or one’s own body that are good or correct solutions or the next right move. Usually many other moves are expressible (in a game of Go there are more possible moves that there are atoms in the universe). Most are bad moves. Cognitive convergence on the small set of right moves is required for virtuosity in complex two person as well as in team sports. One question is whether there are only a small number of right ways to pray, greet, or hold funerals.

Both the expressivist and the cognitivist can demand conformity to having funerals in a certain way. The expressivist defends particular rites because they are ours, that is the way we do funerals around here, and thus doing the rites this way expresses and sustains certain ways we wish to orient ourselves towards deceased loved ones; the cognitivist defends his rites, or some of his rites, or better the way he executes the rites by claiming that they conform to some deeper metaphysical reality. Heaven (tian 天) or God mandates that the rites be executed this way.

2. 1. Order

Rites might save us from disorder, from war, from chaos. Order is better than disorder or chaos, so one might think that rites of greeting signal that I am not an agent of violence, disorder, or chaos. Think of the ways we signal that we are not dangerous to strangers in cities. Averting one’s eyes, a quick smile, nervous laughter, saying “hello.” One way to read all these techniques is that they mean something like “continue, I do not intend to harm you.” This much of course does not produce any positive good. It just removes an obstacle—“there is no war of each against each around here,” or better perhaps: “even if there is a war of each against each around here I am not part of it or, at least, I do not intend to enact havoc on you right now.” The basic rites of engagement say “I am not dangerous,” “I will not create havoc, at least not here and right now.”

2. 2. Harmony

A second rationale for rites is positive and involves the production of the good of harmony. What harmony is or how it reveals itself is not easy to say (Li 2006, 2008). The term harmony derives from the Greek ἁρμονία (harmonía), meaning “joint, agreement, concord” the verb ἁρμόζω (harmozo), “to fit together, to join.” In music, it refers to synchronic overlay and the ways they fit together, but it is also used in common speech to refer to how a melody, a diachronic musical event, hangs together. Harmony is a positive characteristic. What seems disharmonious at first can seem harmonious later, after one gets used to the sound, once one gets over the initial feeling that things are not fitting together well. Musical examples abound of audiences initially disliking, finding odd and disharmonious music that they later found beautiful, harmonious. There was, depending on the source, the rioting or disappointment of the audience to Stravinsky’s “Rites of Spring” in Paris in 1914; there was the skeptical Chinese critics’ response to some of the classical (high bourgeois) Western repertoire (re-)introduced to them by Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra in 1973; and there were many rock n’ roll purists who thought that George Harrison’s interjection of classical Indian music, especially sitar music, to rock n’ roll was discordant (a funny charge when you think about the elders’ view that rock n’ roll was itself the paradigm of discordance, undisciplined noise).

One way that some rites signal harmony as well as order or the intention to not be disorderly is by marking deference, social role, or gender. Boys bow, girls curtsy. In Thailand the wai is a greeting where palms are pressed in prayer-like way, and where the height of the hands and the depth of the bow indicate the status of the other. Such greeting practices indicate that I am not dangerous and that I know my place and yours in the social order. They signal that we are participants in some sort of structure that aims at something more than simple order: harmonious social order.

2. 3. Beauty

A third way rites might be said contribute to human life is by being beautiful or by contributing beauty, artfulness, elegance, choreography, gracefulness to what is ugly or aesthetically neutral but could be pretty. Artfulness might be taken to be its sole contribution or a certain value-added to order or harmony. One thought is that human interaction is somehow dirty, undisciplined, unattractive and that certain rituals, think greeting practices, make it look less so. They put an appealing veneer or overlay on something that is rough, gruff, or unsmooth. If one holds a view like Xunzi that humans interact grossly even if not at first meanly, then rites can be thought of as ways of softening, cleaning up, making pretty what is not so (Mower 2013). If one holds the stronger view, also available in the Xunzi, that all others are threats, then ritualized greeting practices can serve as artful signals that I can be trusted, that I know my place, social role, gender. They signal order, or perhaps they say that you should not expect disorder, chaos, and mayhem to be instigated by me or mine; and they signal this in an artful, aesthetically appealing way.

2. 4. Signaling What Matters

Birth, sexual coming of age, marriage, and death have perhaps a special and universal kind of significance to gregarious social animals like humans. They have significance to the lives of individuals, extended families, clans, and lineages that mark changes of importance. Rites and rituals evolve to mark these events, call group attention to them, and speak in their form, possibly in their content, about how the group conceives the coming, the going, the changing, and how it sees its significance, its mattering. Masai ritual male circumcision, Hebrew bar mitzvah and Catholic confirmation all speak, but in different ways, about coming of age. Signaling in a ritualized way teaches via initiation, group practice, role-modeling how we do such and so, what we conceive as especially important, and how we conceive its importance.

2. 5. Emotional Regulation, Extension, and Enhancement

Birth, death, and puberty are emotional events. Perhaps some of the emotions—joy, sadness, feeling sexual—are universal. However, they occur in a raw and undisciplined manner, or better, they do not initially and automatically occur in what different groups think is their right form. The norms for apt expression of the joy over a newborn or the loss of a loved one—an elder who was once welcomed with such joy and who is now lost—are typically regulated. One might think that it is mainly the behavioral expression of the emotions that is regulated, not how they are experienced first-personally. However, this seems wrong. When Daoists, Confucians, and Mohists debate proper burial practices they are not simply debating mournful facial expressions, respectful postures, burial dress, coffin design, grave depth, whether the deceased is buried with or without his possessions, and so on, they are always also debating how one, in this case the living, ought to experience, express, and conceive of the loss. In addition to stipulating the right rites from a behavioral point of view, the norms are designed to inculcate, regulate, modify, extend, and enhance certain ways of affectively and cognitively experiencing the loss of this loved one, future loved ones, and death in general.

3. 1. Nostalgia

Cicero lamented “O tempore, o mores” (Oh the customs, oh the times). The lament is familiar. The youth (or foreigners) are taking us to hell in a hand basket. It may just be that folks, typically elders, get used to what they are used to and lament change; and it may just be that other folk, typically the youth or foreigners, introduce such change. It is easy to understand nostalgia and other kinds of resistance to change psychologically and sociologically. Nevertheless, it is hard to see how they count one way or another for the importance of ritual conformity, unless there are arguments brought to bear for why homogeneity is important or why. If the answer is that homogeneity, or what is different, fixity of rites is important because it preserves or enhances order, harmony, aesthetic value, or that it best signals what matters and how it matters and fixes apt emotions, then arguments need to be given as to why the old or extant practices do these things better than new, transformed, or heterogeneous practices.

3. 2. Naturalness

One way to defend a set of rites is to claim they are right because they are natural. In classical Chinese Confucian philosophy, alignment with heaven or nature’s ways is a common defense for one form of ritual practice over another. There are many problems with arguments for or from naturalness, which also affect the Aristotelean and Christian versions of natural law theory. How does one specify what is natural? Is it innate in human psychobiology? Or is it what accords with nature’s mandate conceived impersonally or with the wisdom and will of a non-human über-Being who is nature or being itself? And there is controversy about why what is natural is good. Internal to the Chinese Confucian tradition, for example, in the Xunzi, we learn that humans are naturally undisciplined, possibly bad. Li is required to bring discipline. So li is not natural in the sense of innate; it is natural in the sense that li accords with the wisdom of sage kings who detect and follow the mandate of heaven (tianming 天命). However, these are clearly different senses of “nature” and “natural.” The first derives from human nature; the second from the nature of reality, which is deemed or judged to speak authoritatively about how humans ought to be and to live. Consider the debates about funerals in the Zhuangzi 莊子, the Xunzi 荀子 and in the Mozi 墨子. Despite trash-talking between various philosophical schools like Ru, Daoists, and Mohists about the li that govern funerals—what, if anything, the deceased should be buried with, mourning periods, etc.—no party recommends indifference to death, mourning, and funeral rites and wants to leave their relatives’ corpses to be eaten by vermin, coyotes, and jackals, as Mohists are sometimes accused of doing, or just getting on with life after the death of a loved one, as Daoists are said to favor.⁴ Although the Mohists were radical social reformers who believed that the Ru overdo rituals, the Mohists almost certainly believed that the bodies of the deceased should be buried in a respectful manner and not just for public health reasons. The Daoist sage suffers the death of his loved one, but he has prepared for it. The disagreements can be understood as primarily about forms of mourning and questions about whether some Ru rituals—a nobleman buried with his most prized possessions, emperors buried with armies of terra cotta warriors—are elitist, resource extravagant, and thus morally pernicious.

3. 3. Enforcing Li

Suppose one knew what the right rites are, the problem remains as to how to convey, fix, and enforce them. There are many possibilities to accomplish these ends, but here are three: A Normative Authority, Fashion Contagion, and “Nudging.”

3. 4. Group Size and the Function(s) of Li

This brings us to the next concern: How important really are rites today, especially homogeneity of rites across large numbers of people? Robin Dunbar (2010) argues that the evidence is that for the first 240,000 years or so of human existence communities were small and face-to-face. The average number of members in a human community was 150 (actually between 100 and 230) until agriculture and domestication of animals began about 11,000 years ago, and the size of human communities began to grow. At the time of Confucius, the Chinese population is believed to have been between 10-13 million, not much larger than the population of the state of North Carolina, which living there, I can say is not all that crowded, and is tiny in terms of land mass compared to China.⁵

In Analects 9.14, Confucius answers the student who worries about his impending visit to where the nine barbarian tribes live. Confucius reassures him that the uncouthness of the barbarians will be conquered by his own couthness. The idea is that the de 德 of the junzi 君子 is contagious. We know better (Flanagan 2008; Flanagan and Hu 2011). Some good practices spread; others do not. And the multifarious reasons that govern spread—fashion, timing, power, and authority—do not track goodness or badness, couthness or uncouthness of the practices. Even if one thinks that the best practices of rites and virtue will win out over the long haul, it is not because we do (or should) think that our virtues and rites are better aligned with the will of God, the gods, Heaven’s Mandate, or nature’s ways. Our criteria for measuring the goodness or badness of our rites and virtues involve these things for some, but they also involve giving our own contingent history weight: these practices are good because they are ours.

The anthropological literature on groups and group size often speaks about the functions of rites. Tattooing, ritual dancing, burial practices, initiation, and marriage practices almost always begin inside small or smallish groups. They serve to mark members and distinguish them from out-group members, and they spread or fail to spread for all the usual good and bad reasons. One central function is to signal group membership and enhance feelings of membership and solidarity. Presumably rites and rituals still function in this way, and we understand better the mechanisms that cause groups to think that their ways are the right ways. However, we now think of these mechanisms as producing causes, not as producing reasons.

3. 5. Generational Pressure

In the early 1960’s there was a TV show called American Bandstand. Dick Clark was the MC who introduced new pop music (rock n’ roll was just getting legs), while the audience watched teenagers dance as at a hop. My mother taught me as a small boy that gentlemen knew how to dance and play bridge. Dancing involved the sort of dances (sans the talent) that Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers did, or more plausibly, the Fox Trot and various Waltzes. There were also the more edgy Cha Chas, Sambas, and Meringues. On American Bandstand I watched with awe and excitement as the world of orderly gentlemanly dance came undone before my eyes in the practices of boys and girls (all white originally) just a bit older than me. The result: new kinds of dancing—the Lindy, the Twist, the Jerk. Happily, many of these did not last, did not catch on or make it, or if they did, they—in their pure form—were short lived. Arguably, in fact almost certainly, these experiments at the edges of the li of dancing changed the ways we now dance. Well they did, plus emerging knowledge of world music, world dance, and so on.

There are several points: One is that li changes are often perceived as somewhere between objectively wrong and gratuitously annoying by the elders. It is an interesting question whether perceived disharmony is genuine. Some music, e.g., Stravinsky or 12-tone music sounded discordant until patterns were discerned and it no longer sounded discordant. However, the sounds didn’t change, the hearers did. Second, social change, either via the mechanisms of youthful hormones or interaction across groups will put pressure on li, will work to produce changes in li, possibly only around the edges. Confucius mentions that he approves of changes in the fabric of men’s caps for economic reasons. There must be caps, what they are made of is not essential. When the youth bow at the top of steps rather than the bottom, they violate the li. However, whether and when modifications of rites change only form rather than function is contestable. Third, holding to the traditional li always presupposes a certain conception of the right rites or practices; it almost never provides arguments for their rightness or legitimacy. Though, this does not mean that the traditional rites cannot be defended. It does mean that their defense will often involve claims about identity, claims about the way things are done by us, the conditions of group membership, and so on. However, these serve mainly to mark that these rites are ours, not—to repeat again—to show that they are right in some wider sense, or, what is different, in some deeper sense.

3. 6. The Anxiety of Influence

Many modern people get that rites matter and that different communities do the rites that matter, marking birth, death, coming of age, marriage, in different ways. The Hebrew Bible and Muslim “sharia” mark themselves in addition to advancing the faith, as vehicles for protecting communal life and virtue, property, and kinship. The texts of classical China are engaged in a similar project of cultural preservation. However, there is a very modern sensibility in the North Atlantic that expresses resentment at being asked to simply copy the ways of the past and even to the very idea of cultural preservation. Although, how much this trend, dubbed the “anxiety of influence,” by Harold Bloom, pertains to the rejection of rites is difficult to ascertain. On the one hand, the anxiety to being Homo Xerox involves desires to do it one’s own way. There are two recent and familiar modes of challenging the dominant rites regime that have different relations to the anxiety of influence. Consider hip-hop and hipsters, respectively. Hiphop culture overtly transgresses the norms of common decorum, hats on backwards or sideways, fist bumps instead of handshakes, pants halfway down the butt. Hip-hop expresses that there will be change of the dominant normative community or at least that the dominant culture will have to co-exist with an alternative one, one that is suspicious, possibly contemptuous of the other. Hipster-hood on the other hand can be exceedingly, even obsequiously polite, decorous; it often involves retrieval of habits of a lost age, the manners of men in fedoras, the integration of the good manners of old into an aesthetic that allows, even relishes, things that are cool, gay, queer, as well as the formally normal.

The point is that neither community is non-normative, sans rites. However, they both challenge the dominant system in ways that express the anxiety of influence, through a movement of like-minded community members. Perhaps there are some strong poets in the hiphop community, Eminem and Jay-Z come to mind, and even among hipsters, (although I doubt it); but these rite-changing, rite-shifting, rite-challenging movements, like the beatniks, Black Panthers, panthers, hippies, feminists before them, are by and large communal, not individual offerings (Wilson 1995).

3. 7. Pluralism and Cosmopolitanism

This brings me to the last challenge in modern times to the idea that we would do well to find the right rites and coalesce around them, with them. Perhaps if we were to do so then our conflicts would devolve into purely epistemic ones. This is crazy. Here again it is useful to replay the ancient Chinese debate among Confucians, Mohists, and Daoists about burial practices. Confucians say bury them deep in tombs that are emblematic of the life of that individual, with the family jewels, and mourn for three years. Mohists say bury them deep and respectfully and get on with it. Burying one’s loved ones with pottery and jewels and not working is a waste of resources. Daoists recommend an attitude of accepting the cycle of life and death, not fearing or being appalled by death. Here is a famous passage from a Daoist text, the Zhuangzi.

Zhuangzi’s wife died. When Huizi went to convey his condolences, he found Zhuangzi sitting with his legs sprawled out, pounding on a tub, and singing. “You lived with her, she brought up your children, and grew old,” said Huizi. “It should be enough simply not to weep at her death. But pounding on a tub and singing—this is going too far, isn’t it?”

Zhuangzi said, “You’re wrong. When she first died, do you think I didn’t grieve like anyone else? But I looked back to her beginning, and the time before she was born. Not only the time before she was born, but the time before she had a body. Not only the time before she had a body, but the time before she had a spirit. In the midst of the jumble of wonder and mystery a change took place and she had a spirit. Another change and she had a body. Another change and she was born. Now there’s been another change and she’s dead. It’s just like the progression of the four seasons, spring, summer, fall, winter.” “Now she’s going to lie down peacefully in a vast room. If I were to follow after her bawling and sobbing, it would show that I don’t understand anything about fate. So I stopped.” (Watson 1968, 190-191)

Note that this is just an anecdote and is not offered explicitly as a proposal for the right way to do a funeral. Suppose, however, that it is read as such a recommendation, and that a Ru thinker responds that it is appalling. What this would show is that normative communities feel strongly about their li. How could a three-way debate between a Confucian, a Mohist, and a Daoist proceed and be resolved? It would, we know, proceed in part by each advocate bringing in considerations of what is natural and appropriate. But claims about what is natural and appropriate will invoke tradition-specific views about human nature and what makes philosophical and cultural sense, which will beg all the key questions from the point of view of the other tradition.⁶ One might appeal to the other to feel his way into the possibility of conceiving of things differently and doing things differently (e.g., greeting, funerals, re-marriages, kinds of marriage, etc.). But this will almost always be an appeal to re-consider how you conceive and do your li, which will in part be an appeal to consider the contingency of your way of being human and the prospects for doing a life, even if not your life, in a different normatively acceptable way.