Ring a Bell and I’ll Pontificate

Do we do the things we do (at our best) because they are true or because they are useful? This question has been lurking in shadows of pretty much everything I have studied or written about or preached or sought to practice in my own life for much of my adult life. Do our deepest moral intuitions, our most intense yearnings, our fiercest protests, our most soulful longings correspond, on some level, to what is actually true about ourselves, the world, and God, or do they all simply reduce to evolutionarily adaptive strategies that we (for some reason) have a need to transpose into a metaphysical register in the stories we tell ourselves?

True or useful? There seems to me to be a yawning chasm between the two. And if useful is, at rock bottom, all we can ever say about any human belief or behaviour, how puzzling that we seem to need to attach the illusion of truth to it to make it work.

Nick Hobson scratches around the edges of these matters in a piece published in today’s Globe & Mail. The title gives the reader a pretty decent idea of the terrain about to be covered: “Rituals are central to our evolutionary story. So why did I refuse to practise them in my own life?” It’s not hard to see where this will go and the narrative proceeds dutifully along predictable lines. Hobson was raised Catholic, left the faith, read a bit of Richard Dawkins, soured on atheism’s angriest expressions, came back to an appreciation of some of what religious practices can do and how they functioned in our evolutionary past. He did not return to religious faith (obviously!), but he had a bit of nostalgia for ritual, particularly when he became a parent. 

And of course his research had uncovered all kinds of impressive insights about how useful ritual was:

The reason why rituals are so central to our evolutionary story is because they facilitated large-scale group co-operation, which is the reason we exist today in our current social form…

They quite literally bring us together – physically, socially, neurologically. To add to this, rituals also have a remarkably unique anxiolytic effect. They bring a sense of order and control in a world that is inherently unknown and full of chaos. Their predictable and repeated patterns capable of soothing life’s greatest anxieties.

None of this is particularly revelatory, of course. Dawkins et al were singing this song two decades ago, and it wasn’t new to them. Religion is bewildering and childish and dangerous,  of course, but it served a purpose for our ancestors. If only we could take on board the best “insights” of religion and leave behind all the ridiculous metaphysics, all would be well! We would “facilitate cooperation” “soothe life’s anxieties” without needing religious fantasies to make the medicine go down. And so, our author finds himself ringing a bell to summon his children to “Reading Room Corner” and comparing it to the Eucharist. Rituals are rituals, right? All that matters is their utility. 

In a similar vein, I was struck by Ezra Klein’s recent “exit interview” with Ross Douthat, who is leaving the New York Times to be a correspondent at 60 Minutes. At one point, they were talking about some of the excesses and deficiencies of “The Great Awokening” that took over in the early 2020’s and the reactions it has produced. At one point, Douthat offers this:

[W]e can’t moralize at people if we’re also telling them that the universe is empty and meaningless, except for the meaning we impose on it through ideological categories or something. If you’re going to have progressive moralism, you need to be able to claim that it corresponds to something out there in the cosmos that’s real.

In other words, saying that a moral vision is “useful” doesn’t really work unless you can also say it’s “true.” Klein pushes back a bit on this. He doesn’t share Douthat’s Roman Catholic metaphysics. He talks about the Jewish tradition from which he emerged. He tries to appeal to a kind of universal human dignity. But he doesn’t really address Douthat’s point. If it’s not real, not true, if all we can say is that it’s useful, then where do we go? Is it true that human beings possess an unassailable dignity that must be defended and articulated and lived by or isn’t it? True? Or useful? It actually matters. 

Of course, what is true can also be useful. It would be kind of absurd if there were not some overlap in these categories. I think that Christianity’s vision of the good, the true, and the beautiful is also useful in all kinds of ways. But something can be true and not terribly evolutionarily useful (I’m thinking here of Jesus’ insistence that our loves should extend beyond those who love us in return, as just one example). And it is (I hope) blindingly obvious that many things can be useful toward various human ends and not true. It’s never either true or useful as if these were inflexible and impermeable categories. They mix and mingle in all kinds of ways. But it matters which one takes priority. Indeed, to even use the word “matters” betrays that we already believe this to be the case. 

I, for one, could never embrace a ritual if I didn’t believe it was connected to the truth. If all I believed was going on in the Eucharist was that we were collectively participating in the “facilitation of large group cooperation” or engaging in “predictable and repeated patterns capable of soothing life’s greatest anxieties,” I would save myself the trip to the altar. Usefulness be damned. I need it to be true.