Sincerity or Ritual

The authors of Ritual and its Consequences (104–6) note a contrast between civilizations that are bound by authoritative rituals and those that are not. The latter are deeply concerned with sincerity: “Civilizations or movements with a diminished concern for ritual have an overwhelming concern with sincerity, which we can see in forms as widely varied as those Puritan sermons and the Buddhist concern with uncovering the Buddha nature hidden within each of us. In some sense, then, sincerity works as the social equivalent of the subjunctive, which we discussed earlier. If there is no ritual, there is no shared convention that indexes a possible shared world. Instead, social relationships have to rely on a never-ending production of new signs of sincerity (though of course there can be ritualized forms of the search for sincerity).”