THE RITUAL EFFECT

A Harvard behavioral scientist provides validation for “ritualistic behavior.”

Norton pries apart personal from religious ritual—i.e., a series of actions performed in just the same way as a species of magical thinking, though ritual can be much more than that. He recounts, for example, that just as Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards has to have a slice of shepherd’s pie before taking the stage, the author followed a pattern of singing and reading to lull his young daughter to sleep. “I instantly and unthinkingly transformed into a shamanic madman,” he writes. That shamanic madness has many purposes: It supposedly effects desired behavior, helps separate ordinary from sacred spaces, and brings luck. The author also pries apart ritual from habit, suggesting that if you don’t care whether you shower or brush your teeth first, then you’re a model pragmatist, but if you observe a certain order, you’re performing a personal rite that may seem meaningless but is full of meaning all the same. A habit, notes Norton, is “the what,” and the ritual is “the how,” and between the two lies a world of difference. Those personal rituals, our own hows, lend a sort of purpose to our lives, and if they’re shared, as one might do in a church or a club, “they do bring the larger group together and serve as an affirmation—reminding us that together we have gotten through this experience before.” As Norton assures us, rituals have their uses, whether the annual practice of spring cleaning or preparing dishes for a Thanksgiving feast—and they become, in time, the basis of tradition, just as we very likely learned those rituals from parents and other elders.

A good-humored, gentle exhortation to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary and add a little magic to our lives.