The Ethical Power of Rituals

Teaching about religion, ethics & the earth

Photo by Sixteen Miles Out on Unsplash

There’s nothing inherently ethical about a ritual. A ritual is a kind of ethereal technology, a software, an embodied practice or performance that’s unified and memorable enough to be repeatable. A ritual can help us feel things, think things, see things, smell things. It can help us bond with one another. It can make us aware of our own complex inner depths. But, like any technology, a ritual can be used to sacralize, and recruit us into, absolutely horrific behavior.  At the heart of every repressive social and political regime are a set of rituals that unify people toward destruction.

Despite this, rituals are ambivalent enough to also do good. I’ve been thinking about rituals more than usual this year, as I’ve been teaching a new class I’m calling Religion, Ethics & the Earth. I’ve struggled, myself, with the question of how to think and teach about ethics. This term, I asked students to think with me about the ethical power rituals can have, and how that ethical power might be harnessed to change the way that we inhabit, and feel about, our home: earth.

Why I’ve Never Been an Ethicist

I’ve always had a lot of complex, ambivalent, feelings about ethics as a discipline in the academy. As someone who works at the intersection of religious and philosophical ideas, I’ve always felt pressured to be an ethicist: the sort of thinker who dedicates her intellectual labor to the right thing. In an environment like the one we live in, where speculative activities (like reading and thinking) are often derided for having very little cash value, it’s always seemed to me that ethics manages to escape this sort of critique. Instruction on how to be good (or how to be better) still seems to retain some social value. Ethics feel practical, useful, worthwhile. It’s an intellectual product you can market, and defend.

But perhaps it’s precisely because of this perceived cash value that I’ve always had this deep, gut impulse, sense that I am anything but an ethicist. Perhaps ethics has never seemed whimsical enough for me. Perhaps I’ve always felt like it awakens my deep-seated, badly hidden, bossiness. Perhaps I’ve just felt that the right thing is always too obvious, and pointing it out is pedantic. Perhaps I’ve felt that the right thing is an ideal that’s too frequently ignored, and too infrequently achieved, to spill much ink over. There are probably a lot of reasons why, but despite the fact that I threw “ethics” into the title of my PhD dissertation (I called it Dream of the Creature: Religion, Ethics, and Interspecies Kinship), I’ve never thought of myself as an ethicist.

When I started my job at Hanover College, in 2016, none of this was an issue because my colleague Mike Duffy taught all of the ethics courses in the department. This included a required course in ethics, for our majors. But last year Mike retired, and this left an ethics shaped hole in our department curriculum that I needed, somehow, to fill. I knew I had to teach the course about something I was interested in—earth stuff. So I created Religion, Ethics, and the Earth. But I was anxious, and especially dreading the slog through familiar ethical theories.

The Bankruptcy of Environmental Ethics

I’ve learned a lot from people who write about environmental ethics. I respect, and appreciate, their work. So I’ve always felt a little shame about the fact that I’ve never been driven to join their ranks. Obviously my own complex feelings about the discipline of ethics is part of this. But when I think more specifically about environmental ethics, I think I’ve been subject to some of the same intoxicating apathy that my students have been subject to. Like my students, I’ve often been frustrated by what feels like the increasing purposelessness of environmental ethics. 

As Freya Matthews has pointed out, after more than forty years of thoughtful work the discipline of environmental ethics seems to have made little material difference to the climate or extinction crises. It’s difficult not to feel like the shifts in habit, behavior, and disposition that environmental ethicists often commend are virtuous but futile. 

In the middle of our winter semester, my class had a visit from Travis Rieder, a bioethicist and Hanover alum who was on campus to promote his new book, Catastrophe Ethics. As he puts it, in an essay about the book that he wrote for Time, today “everything we do seems to matter” and yet “nothing we do seems to matter.” It’s especially easy, perhaps, to feel caught up in this paradox of matter and antimatter when it comes to environmental ethics and the problem of climate change. As Rieder puts it, “many of us feel an individual responsibility to address massive, collective problems, despite an inability to act in ways that have a meaningful impact on those problems. The problems are too big, and my contribution too small, to make a difference.” This is the structuring conundrum of what he calls catastrophe ethics. He captured, pretty succinctly, what a lot of my students feel.

We know that the problems we face are systemic, and structural. And we want to do something. But we’re also confronted, constantly, with the meaninglessness of our individual contributions. Recycling feels pointless, when we know that the whole recycling system is broken and badly built. We can reduce our personal reliance on single use plastics, at least a little, but their mass production proceeds unabated. I could go on, but I won’t. You know what I’m talking about. We know that the change we need is structural, but we also feel like the structures we need are broken, destroyed, powerless, or failing to come together. Convening on social media and other virtual environments, to talk about our ethical commitment to the environment, can sometimes feel like a force for change. But mostly, it doesn’t.

When I first started teaching, a decade ago, I often found myself in the position of trying to get students to care about climate change. This year, all of my students seem to recognize that climate change is a problem. It’s an issue that scares most of them, some of them more than others. But I haven’t had to convince anyone to care about the problem of climate change as such. Instead, I’ve had to convince them that it’s still worth it, to talk and think about environmental ethics, despite the incredible mess we’re in. And I didn’t just have to convince them, I also had to convince myself. Which was a more difficult problem.

The Ethics of Hope and Hopelessness 

At the heart of these ethical problems I’ve been struggling with is a complex set of feelings. We feel like we want to matter, we feel like we want to change things, we feel like we don’t matter, we feel like nothing matters. These feelings aren’t ancillary to the ethical discussions. Instead, they shape them. I decided that we needed, as a class, to spend time with the complex of feelings.

It seems to me that, for the past decade or so, my colleagues in religious studies and theology have been engaged in endless debates about the problem of hope. Is the world itself too corrupt, and broken, to invest hope into it? Is hope itself simply a dimension of privilege? Is hope a passive activity that generates little to no action? Is hope the one thing that people seek out, when they go looking for religion? Is hope the thing that fuels activism in the first place? I threw a lot of these questions at my students. And I asked them to contemplate whether we owe future generations any particular sort of affective dispositions or investments, as we look toward a rapidly changing planet. Do we, in other words, owe each other some sort of hope for the future of life on earth? Or is hope an ethically deceptive trap that will keep us from nurturing something real for future generations?

I was surprised by how much my students had to say. Some of them launched thoughtful defenses of the affect of hope. They had complex reasons for clinging to it, and they did so despite what they recognized as obvious and reasonable opposition. Others pushed back against the idea that our affects impact our ethical actions: what matters is what we do (or don’t) do, our actions not our feelings.

I found it cathartic to be able to talk about feelings. And I admired the way they were able to make meaning out of their feelings. These particular kinds of feelings—hope and hopelessness—seemed like exactly the right affects to tap into, given our current situation (nothing we do matters, and it feels as if everything we do matters). Nevertheless, while these conversations felt cathartic, and sometimes inspiring, they made me think more about our feelings than about the ground we walk on, the trees that shade us, or the birds that sometimes sound like they’re singing just for us when really, they’re not. 

The Ethical Power of Rituals

I suppose that this is why I started turning to rituals. I wanted something—some tool or technology—that might encourage my students to connect with the more than human world outside of our classroom. One of the books that I had students reading, this year, was Elizabeth McAnally’s Loving Water, which helped challenge me to speak and teach about rituals in a new way.

McAnally’s book is especially good for thinking about the Yamuna River, where she’s done fieldwork, and the religious ideas and practices that fuel people to protect it (or, as the case may be, not to protect it). I think it was watching this short clip, from a BBC documentary, that initially made me start thinking about the ethical power of rituals. 

As you can see, the Yamuna river itself is so polluted that it’s now functionally dead in some places. It can no longer support life. And it’s toxic enough for people that, if they spend more than a few minutes in it, the water can damage their skin. And yet, the river is a goddess. There are rituals that call people to the water once a year, to bring offerings to her, and to gather in community at her shores. And they go, however toxic the water might be. She might be toxic, but she is still a goddess. 

What got me, I think, was the statement that the Chhath festival is the one time of the year when the people of Delhi at large really stop to think and speak, to remember, what’s happening to the water and how deeply it impacts the people. Here, we could say, it’s the ritual and the ceremony that have the power to direct political attention. The ritual becomes a powerful statement about space and place—about how much the land, and the water it holds, matters.

I asked my students who practice the central water ritual in Christianity—baptism—if they could imagine themselves being baptized in a polluted river like the Ohio, which we can see from the window of our classroom. Could they imagine themselves inhabiting the ritual of baptism as a way to draw attention to the water itself? Most of them said “no.” They don’t think of their river as a god. God might, possibly, care about the water or even love it. But God isn’t the river.

Sometimes, as in this case, rituals can show us our limits; what we might, or might not, be willing to do. They can show us what sort of behavior, what sort of movement patterns, can be codified and repeated.

But rituals can also be a form of play, and play can open us up to others in ways that almost nothing else can. I asked my students, as an assignment, to seek out a tree—one that they could have a conversation with. I asked them to find a special tree,  and to ask it “are you a being?” And they had to listen for a response. They came back to class, to report their findings, and very few of them reported an actual conversation (though some did invent dialogues). Almost all of them, however, came back with something very thoughtful to say. We had a great conversation about what it might mean to listen to a tree. How might it respond? How do we translate the breeze rustling through its leaves? Is this a form of speech?

Rituals also offer a pathway into our sense perception that reading doesn’t offer us. I wanted students to think about how our sense perception shapes our relation to environments. One day, during class, I asked them to pretend to be an animal: one that flies, or one that crawls. We went outside for the game. They spun around in the grass, smelled things, gathered things, and climbed trees. They played! When we returned to the classroom, some of them admitted that, had we simply gone outside as humans, they would have forgotten to think about their senses at all.

In another assignment I asked them to design a ritual to help them connect with water. Some of them meditated in front of the river. Others incorporated water into their prayer practice, or created a ritual bath. Another student played music for water. I asked them whether their ritual had any sort of ethical power. Some believed that it made them more aware of how they were using water, or it made them more aware of how deeply we depend on water. One student confessed that she ended up using far more water than she’d thought she would, for her ritual, and it made her feel like she’d wasted it. I don’t think the rituals had much power, in themselves, but they concentrated my students’ ethical attention and intention in a way that few other things could.

We can also think about politics ritualistically. We talked about the Standing Rock protests, about the water protectors, and I asked them to reflect on protests as a form of ritual. I made up a fictional case study, about a protest over water rights, and asked them to think about how they would, or wouldn’t, be involved in the protest and why. I asked them to write a (fake) email to a politician expressing their thoughts about the issue, and the protest. I learned that (as I suspected) a lot of students don’t really know how to write a proper email. But I also learned that the positions they took in relation to this imagined protest revealed a lot about their ethics. 

Rituals Won’t Save the Earth

This wasn’t a class that taught students how to save the world. The rituals we learned about, talked about, or performed aren’t going to solve the global water crisis or the climate crisis. I don’t have any delusions about that, and neither do my students. But the sad fact is that most of the concrete, practical things that my students can do for the earth won’t save it either. 

So what did students get out of these conversations? Was there any benefit to these conversations about the ethical power of rituals? I’m not sure. But I’m listening to what they have to say, at the end of the semester, and it feels like they’ve taken something real from these conversations.

As one student put it, the ritual he created was a way of helping him come to terms with some of the pain he feels when he thinks about what’s happening to the earth. It was a way of acknowledging that the pain is real, but that his connections to the more than human world are real and powerful, too. Another student said that, while she’s always cared about the environment, performing this ritual made her feel like that dimension of care was deeper, and less superficial. Many students said that the ritual helped them remember what a blessing, or gift, water is. It gave them a profound sense of gratitude. Rituals won’t solve the global water crisis, but there’s no world in which deep gratitude for water—the kind we practice and perform—isn’t (collectively) beneficial.

There is a risk, I think, that rituals can give us a false sense of virtue. As if, by doing a simple ritual, we can seek release from the ethical responsibility to act. But despite that risk, I do think I’ve become increasingly convinced that rituals aren’t simply powerful, but that they can bear or transmit an ethical power as well. That they can be a vehicle for ethical practices and reflections. At the very least, rituals have drawn me out of my apathy and made me feel like I can start thinking about ethics again.