In Search of Civic Ritual

21 Jan, 2024

Since I’ve been rereading a lot of Simon Critchley in the past few days, I’ve been unable to get out of my mind the question he addresses in The Faith of the Faithless: essentially, how or whether we could find something, in a world in which religious belief is no longer a common guidepost or motivating factor, that citizens could believe in that would foster civic life and engagement, as opposed to, say, polarized pursuit of individual interests. Critchley calls what he’s seeking “a motivating and authorizing [nonreligious] faith which... might be capable of forming solidarity in a locality, a site, a region.”¹ And for him, faith is not belief in a divine being, but fidelity to an event or experience.

There is, of course, a lot more going on here than I’ve suggested, and Critchley thinks through much of his investigation using Rousseau, clearing up misinterpretations of the meaning of the social contract, highlighting what Rousseau felt was the need for some sort of civil ritual/s that would reinforce citizens’ ties to each other—in which they’re essentially celebrating themselves. This doesn’t mean ugly patriotism, à la “USA! USA!” But Critchley, even while asserting he has “always been skeptical about the necessity for noble lies,” doesn’t want to dismiss the potential usefulness of something that might help overcome the disheartening polarization, apathy, and/or cynicism that seem even stronger now than when the book was published in 2012.²

I'm wary about made-up rituals, and especially about patriotism—but simultaneously realize that if we don’t find something that’ll get us talking to, and not shouting at or threatening, each other, we’re doomed. So I’ve been going back and considering others’ thoughts about community motivation and those so-called noble lies that might be necessary to sustain a state or city or even regular social gathering. What follows are only very brief sketches that I hope to consider later in deeper fashion.

The Sort of Religiously Based Demotivation to Avoid

First, let’s start with the sort of lie that’s anything but noble: Miguel de Unamuno’s short story, “San Manuel the Good, Martyr.”³ This is a case of religion, or at least a religious figure, holding a village together. Very basically, we have Angela describing how the good parish priest Don Manuel went about improving people's lives through his generosity and patience and granting of wiggle room, where doctrine was concerned. And lo and behold, he even convinces Angela’s world-travelling progressive brother Lazaro to stay in the village and take up church-centered work of serving all the poor and ignorant folk around.

But holy scandal, Batman! Lazaro was only won over through lots of earnest talk with the priest, who confessed to him (and later to Angela) that he didn’t really believe any of this religious stuff—but that he kept up the charade because the people were essentially too ignorant to handle the truth. As he tells the young man,

The truth? The truth Lazaro is perhaps something terrible, something intolerable, something mortal; the simple people could not live with it... What is needed here is that they live in a healthy way in unanimity of feeling, and with the truth, with my truth, they wouldn’t live. Let them live. And this is what the church does. It lets them live.

The people are apparently incapable of finding or doing anything better for themselves, so better shield them from disappointment. As the gentle priest is reaching the end of his days, he tells the brother and sister

Resignation and charity in everyone, for everyone. Because the rich have to be resigned to their wealth, and to life, and also the poor have to be charitable with the rich. Social questions? Leave them alone, that does not concern us. Should they bring a new society in which there are no longer rich nor poor, in which wealth is justly distributed, on which everything belongs to everybody, and then what? Don’t you think that from the general well-being there will rise up even more strongly the tedium of life?.... Let us give them opium, that they may sleep and dream.

The story and the time in which it was written (1930) were very different from the atmosphere in which Latin American priests, influenced by liberation theology, thought keeping people in a drugged drudgery wasn’t exactly noble, or in line with the way they were reading their religious teaching. As Olivia Singer has it, according to the outlook of liberation theology, “People are encouraged to become active agents of their own destiny and in effect to liberate themselves from the confines of injustice.”⁴ So you’ve still got a religious core here, but it’s far less insulting to the everyday person—and overtly encouraging of something like civic participation—than what seems to me the fundamental dishonesty, as well as encouragement to passivity, of Unamuno’s set-up. (Admittedly, I may also be reacting to the story’s treacly style, which may still contribute to my vast dislike of it.) In other words, not the model I’m (or Critchley’s) looking for.

Moving to Soft Patriotism

Then we’ve got good old Simone Weil, who was trying to think about how to bring the French back from the destruction of World War II, without falling back on the sort of national pride that involves asserting your superiority over others and being unwilling to keep a critical eye on yourself. Her solution in The Need for Roots? Get everyone to practice “compassion for [one’s] country,” a “compassion felt for fragility,… keenly conscious of the fact that the existence of really beautiful things ought to be assured forever, and is not.”⁵ Any suffering the French are undergoing, then, should be a spur to pull together and work to alleviate said suffering; a way of looking critically at what you might be doing that’s maintaining or worsening suffering; and a means of recognizing that suffering is more or less a universal lot, an unavoidable reality which, because everyone suffers, should keep us from trying to see ourselves as special, and should enhance our ability to connect with all suffering others. Plus, the poor here aren’t told to love their church and expect better in the next life.

It is, to sound all too dismissive, a nice thought. But in the world in which we currently find ourselves, where the very concept of compassion is viewed by quite a lot of people as a sign of weakness, it’s not really a viable place to start. Weil’s embrace of suffering, too, gets a little too celebratory to me, almost circling around to an uneasy, even critical, coziness with Don Manuel.

A New Situation in Which to Ask What’s to Be Done

Since I’ve only just begun reading The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance, I can’t yet say how Franco Berardi will offer anything like a practical solution to the mostly European situation he’s describing in 2011: one in which protests, whether peaceful or violent, make no difference, given the rule of global finance. As he says about the former form of protests (and with relevance to the latter), they "are effective in the frame of democracy, but democracy is over now that techno-financial automatisms have taken the place of political decisions."⁶ In something like Weil’s move, Berardi does seem to hint that we could all get behind an understanding of each other’s sheer exhaustion, but so far, he hasn’t taken that thought any further. He does want to rescue language from the ways it’s been eviscerated by economics-led calls for efficiency and quantification—apparently through a celebration of poetry, which would itself give us access to and the ability to believe in greater imagination about what we could do to change things in a meaningful way. Things may end up sounding more convincing by the time I reach the end of the book, but I’m guessing if the poetic theater and, well, occupation, of the Occupy movement failed to bring people together in a globally effective way, something like a poetic recapturing of language isn’t going to provide the motivation, guidance, or sort of rituals we need to improve the political scene.

A Silly Gesture: The Holiday Train

It’s probably a sign of resignation, but here’s the only real-world example I could think of that might qualify as a Critchley-worthy civic ritual, in which the people themselves are engaged in self-celebration, and therefore doing even a bit to recognize themselves as part of something like a self-willed whole. Around Christmas and the new year, Chicago outfits a subway train in decorations and lights, and it’s even led by a dude on an open-air sleigh dressed as Santa (I've no idea how he’s not asphyxiated or frozen over the course of his journey). A schedule is provided for which line the train will run on on a given day, but you’re never sure when or where it might show up. But when you’re standing there on a packed platform, just wanting to get home after a uselessly tiring day at the office, and everyone around you feels equally exhausted and irritated, and the lights and music pull up, something changes, and changes noticeably.

The doors open, and municipal elves greet you with candy canes and what seems like unfaked joy and enthusiasm as you walk into a car where music is playing, colored lights have softened the usual dishwater-hued walls, and spicy scents are being pumped in and actually succeeding in making you believe no one has ever urinated or defecated or thrown up or stubbed out a cigarette on a seat or passageway, and no industrial bleach was ever tossed around in a futile attempt to clean it up. You look around as the train gets going, and in spite of themselves, every damn person in the car is doing something more than scowling—might, in fact, even be looking, even smiling, at each other. People are even packing up their phones in a sort of wonder, and for at least the distance between one station and another, have relaxed enough in front of each other to accept that something good is, if only temporarily, possible—and even seeing the train pass in the distance provides something like a good omen. Maybe this all works because no one's asked to believe or do anything, much less endorse some sort of edifying mantra or activity. You don't even have to take the candy if you don't want it; hell, you don't even have to get on the train if it's not your thing. But what might this little holiday ritual be, other than a celebration of being there together in and as part of the city?

I’ve alleged many a time that one of the best things the city does to keep people from going at each other’s throats is to run that train. It’s silly, and it’s not going to do anything to even begin solving the real, longstanding structural issues that would plague even a healthily functioning municipal government, which Chicago can’t claim. But it’s the sort of ritual even I can get behind. And if you could figure out a way to provide and promote the sort of good collective feeling, that collective sense of possibility, that I’ve always experienced on the holiday train, and then somehow help it lead to the next step of people working together in small or large ways to change their city—then I’ll take it, and (probably) won’t even make fun of its schmalz.

The Lingering Question

I still feel uncomfortable about the need for civic rituals—for what amounts to people’s need for a grand excuse to treat each other with respect, much less take each other’s welfare into consideration. The discomfort grows ever stronger with the embrace of a noble lie. But something’s got to give here, and as we’ve seen in the last few years in the US, those calls that went up throughout the Biden inauguration’s televised celebration—“Let’s unite, America!”—didn’t quite work. And given the understandable apathy and exhaustion that result from the finance-driven disinvestment Berardi describes, much less the jerry-rigging of so many US electoral districts, we need something more than apple-pie good cheer, or even free candy among strangers on a train, to start convincing people to take up some sort of struggle against it all. As usual, then, I guess I’ll keep reading and talking to people, and hope to find something good and even possibly useful in the mix.

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^{1. Simon Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology (New York: Verso, 2012), 4.↩}

^{2. Critchley, 86.↩}

^{3. I no longer have the printed text of the story, but I did find an English translation online, for which no translator's or even site administrator's name seems to be given. All quotations from Unamuno's story in this post are taken from that site: http://azulejo.atspace.com/unamuno.html↩}

^{4. Olivia Singer, "Liberation Theology in Latin America," Modern Latin America web supplement for 8th ed.↩}

^{5. Simone Weil, The Need for Roots, translated by Arthur Wills (New York: Harper & Row, 1952), 170, 172.↩}

^{6. Franco "Bifo" Berardi, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance, Semiotext(e) Intervention Series 14 (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012, 53.↩}