Eleven Years Ago Today: Secular rituals?

By Moristotle

[Originally published on Wednesday, November 15, 2006. We have corrected a couple of typos, corrected the note at the bottom, and added an image from the magazine cited.]

From the September 2006 interview of Sam Harris in The Sun Magazine:

The new world religion

On the flight with Bernard Walsh and his father to Hawaii (in David Lodge's novel Paradise News) is Rupert Sheldrake, an anthropologist in the field of tourism, who has overheard the Walshes' conversation and approaches Bernard:

"He said you were a theologian."
      "Well, I teach in a theological college."
      "You're not a believer?"
      "No."
      "Ideal," said Sheldrake. "I'm interested in religion myself, obliquely. The thesis of my book is that sightseeing is a substitute for religious ritual. The sightseeing tour as secular pilgrimage. Accumulation of grace by visiting the shrines of high culture. Souvenirs as relics. Guidebooks as devotional aids. You get the picture."
      "Very interesting," said Bernard. "So this is a sort of busman's holiday?" He indicated the Travelwise label on Sheldrake's stainless steel attaché case.
      "Good Lord, no," said Sheldrake with a mirthless smile. "I never go on holiday. That's why I moved into this field in the first place. I always hated holidays, even as a kid. Such a waste of time, sitting on the beach, making sandpies, when you could be at home doing some interesting hobby. Then, when I got engaged, we were both students at the time, my fiancée insisted on dragging me off to Europe to see the sights: Paris, Venice, Florence, the usual things. Bored the pants off me, till one day, sitting on a lump of rock beside the Parthenon, watching the tourists milling about, clicking their cameras, talking to each other in umpteen different languages, it suddenly struck me: tourism is the new world religion. Catholics, Protestants, Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, atheists—the one thing they have in common is they all believe in the importance of seeing the Parthenon. Or the Sistine Chapel, or the Eiffel Tower. I decided to make it my PhD subject. Never looked back...." [p. 61]

After visiting the exhibit of "The Unknown Monet: Pastels and Drawings" at The Clark in Williamstown, Massachusetts on Friday, I'd add the works of Claude Monet (1840-1926) to "the sights" that (in some sense) unite people in the visiting. A lily pond behind The Clark:

Secular rituals?

From the September 2006 interview of Sam Harris in The Sun Magazine:

...What we need are secular rituals.

This is an idea that has been bouncing around among scientists: that we need a kind of scientific liturgy. It's not as if, looking into this universe billions of light-years across, you can't find anything amazing to say about reality. It's actually far more amazing than the God of the Bible stalking the deserts of the Middle East, demanding burnt offerings. So we need a language that expresses a reaonable awe at the nature of the cosmos and our existence in it. And we need to make this language emotionally moving for people. I think it would be thrilling if we had a temple of reason that presented through ritual our growing scientific understanding of ourselves in the cosmos. Surely we could think of profound, uplifting, scientific things to say at the occasion of somebody's death. It's not as if, once you divest yourself of your religious myths, you're left with an excruciatingly boring, trimmed-down sense of confinement. In fact, it's the religions that are excruciatingly boring and confining. The scientific truth, so far as we understand it, is magical and open-ended and thrilling. It just takes a little more work to undersand it.

You can find a longer excerpt (as well as information about how to subscribe to the print edition) on the Magazine's web site. (Note, though, that the excerpt doesn't include the quotation above.)