In our part of the world, most people today recognize that our way of life is unsustainable. Yet we seem unable to enact the changes required.
It is as if we’ve become locked into a codependency – masked as progress – with a way of life that presupposes nearly free fuel from the past, relentless extraction of finite natural resources and of people’s lived time here and now, and the systematic mortgaging of the future through credit mechanisms that ensure a continuation of our present lifestyle.
Is this why it appears impossible to access alternatives to continuing “forward”, toward what may unfold into an ecological, economic, political, and humanitarian catastrophe? Because a particular logic has, over centuries, been institutionalized in society and gradually internalized within us all; not least the Cartesian dualist notion of an inner and an outer world – the very precondition for our culture’s conviction in a God-given human right of ownership: the right to name, control, own, and exploit everything outside one’s perceived “inner” self; what the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa describes as a “human drive to render the world available to possess”.
The philosopher Byung-Chul Han has observed that rituals are disappearing from our culture. According to him, this has led to the emergence of a fluid condition marked by permanent demands for productivity, with an increasingly inhuman life as its consequence. In dialogue with Byung-Chul Han’s analysis, however, we argue the opposite: rituals have hardly disappeared. Rather, they have changed form into habitual patterns within work, consumption, entertainment, social media, politics, bureaucracy, economics, and so on. Transformed into everyday, taken for granted behaviour, they risk steering us “behind the scenes”, concealed by the notion that we are all merely rational. The myth of our rationality thus becomes a veil behind which forces beyond democratic control can thrive.
These perspectives on societal development evoke a need to experience what is actually happening – to really get in touch with the reality behind the mediated representations of events that constantly flood us. “Everything that was once directly experienced has now been replaced with its representation ,” to quote Guy Debord (1967).
For more than half a century, at least in our part of the world, we have become used to a world order that has afforded us disproportionate prosperity at the cost of an illusory sense of security. And today, surrounded by screens, we all risk being stunned by just witnessing the polycrises that have followed, mediated around the clock, almost as entertainment (a case in point of representation).
Yet, the possibility remains to experience reality through shared, careful, and exploratory action, independent of learned assumptions. In this way, we humans – as nature, and as beings entangled in relation with everything, both within and around us (whether we like it or not) – can affirm our human agency in the ongoing process of becoming that defines all life, and engage with this predicament as consciously and carefully to the extent of our ability. Rather than – as we have been taught – attempting to coerce, steer, and dominate what we believe is the “external” according to our own designs.
RITE agency has therefore chosen the concept of Societal cultivation as the guiding motif for our exploration of how rites and rituals may be practiced in careful and conscious ways – as constructive tools for the cultivation of society, tools which, when used with awareness, can help us co-create complex, living culture; cultivate and be cultivated together.