On Rituals

Mikhail Epstein

From afar, American life appears to be so much democratic revelry. In fact, there is nothing more foreign to democracy than revelry. Rather, democracy is a ritual, both a manufactured and rather conventional way of behaving, to which it is best to adhere voluntarily. While it is possible to step away from it, no one who holds on to it by force doesn’t sooner or later understand that it would have been better not to have stepped away. In particular, this was understood by the young rebels of the 60s who at first decided that it was possible to live differently, wasted a lot of time, and then returned to the norms and mores of the so-called “establishment” anyway.

Not long ago I was at an anti-war demonstration in front of the White House. Young people were defaming the president, accusing his dad of not having “cleaned up” in time while beginning to set up his son, then there would no need to demand from the black-sheep Bush that he remove American troops from Saudi Arabia. Shouts and abuse were in plenty, the long-standing crowd seethed, sang, recited poems and speeches as they walked past the main house of the country. And no one doubted, despite the sea of idiocy and banality, that this was democracy.

Then I returned home by the same route as one of the demonstrators. He continued to beat on his tambourine and shout slogans – but when we came to a red light at a corner, he stopped and waited, although no one was coming. How many people would agree that this too is democracy – another of its necessary facets? For the disgruntled American, both protesting and stopping before a red light were ritual elements, without which democracy would become an unrestrained element. But for me, a law-abiding supporter of the American government, my legs, according to the Soviet custom, carried me across the empty street despite the red light. So which one of us is more dangerous and antisocial: the one who was abusing the president within the confines of the law, or me, who broke but a small law, but a law never-the-less?

Democracy is not just a system of beliefs, it is above all a capacity for agreeing on rules – and at the same time observing them, that is, establishing a ritual that works for everyone. A ritual is a means of saving time and effort. It is possible, for example, for everyone to rush for the bus door at the same time, shoving each other in the process, but in such a struggle, you will on the whole push aside as many people as push you aside, and, after wasting lots of effort, you will get on the bus much later than if you had simply waited on line. Americans stand on line in a splendidly meek, patient or even joyful way, not only not trying to avoid them, but somehow even taking pleasure in waiting on line, as if it were a most rational and economic expenditure of time.

America, however, is full of such rituals whose rationality is difficult to surmise. Once, for instance, I fell into complete shock when my wife told me that I was supposed to teach my sons to bake cookies – such was one of the points of the Boy Scout program. As it happened, I was supposed to leave town that week and I decided, according to the Soviet custom, to wave off this pedagogical measure, especially since I never was very good at baking cookies. It turned out that the parents of the other scouts condemned me for refusing to teach my sons a fatherly lesson.

Good, I said to my wife, you can bake cookies with them yourself, as for me, I have business in New York. But this wound up being impossible – American honesty excludes any deviation from the ritual, even in such matters as whether it is the mother or the father that adds flour to dough with their kid. And so, having called home from New York, I found out to my shame that on that day the leadership of the Boy Scouts had sent two adult Mormon-instructors to teach my boys how to bake cookies instead of their deplorably absent father. Only a non-American past saved me from lasting shame and degradation in the eyes of the Americans.

However, the cookie theme did not conclude with this, but continues to present me with lessons of ritual service to the American gods of cooking and enterprise. Now I am occupied with distributing orders for cookies which the scouts of my daughter’s group will bake over the next month. It turns out that a father is supposed to advertise these cookies amongst his coworkers so as to secure the complete financial success of the children’s undertaking. And so I go tearing into the offices of prominent scholars, assembled from around the world, interrupt the train of their strategic meditations on the fates of the world in order to explain the advantages of mint and vanilla cookies baked by children to the glory of the Girl Scout movement.

And here’s the interesting thing: not once did anybody frown at the small-scale commotion that had torn into his office, quite the opposite, having sensed the pure spirit of the ritual, they all hurried sympathetically to take part in it. With words of encouragement for an innocent adolescent tradition and meek paternal initiative.

There are so many rituals in American life that it very much resembles one endless ritual – and this makes all kinds of social relations much easier, reducing the greater part of them to the level of a second system of signs.

In a less ritualized society, Soviet society for example, all social relationships are deeply significant and are instantly reduced to the elucidation of the relationship. A ritual has not been established, every relationship – even over a store counter, in a bar, or at a ticket booth – arises for the first time, as if from nothing, and is liable to a thorough discussion by the high contracting parties. Who are you, and who am I, what are we doing here, and why are we together, and not the opposite?

In this sense, the banal question “do you respect me?” is far from being banal. In it, if we translate it into the exact language of social psychology, is expressed the need to establish the possibility of social relations before they can actually be established. Every individual in Russia is so individual that it is necessary to search for confirmation of his social essence in each separate occasion. Respect is in no way something which is in the air, it is deeply significant and is revealed only by means of a painstaking, careful investigation into the soul of another person. It is worth the salesman’s time to sense that a buyer does not respect him enough, and therefore won’t buy anything else. For in Russia the commodity takes second place to comradeship.

And with every new meeting [vstrecha], as with every new acquaintance [vstrechnyi], this question of mutual respect must be decided anew, because he who respected you yesterday can cease to respect you today. And even over the course of a single conversation relations can change, so it necessary to elucidate these relations constantly. From this it follows that respect between Soviet citizens is not at all a tribute to general form and ritual, but a special tribute to an individual personality, its superior qualities, its merits before an interlocutor.

As far as America is concerned, ritual here is in the air. And this is not so much an earned respect, as a pointless joy in seeing each other – a joy which flutters about the air as if separate from the faces with their universal American smile. The smile is the chief American ritual and the content of all forms of behavior, or more exactly, the form of all content.

So here a passer-by comes around the corner, still not having managed to look you over and assure himself that you are worthy of respect. To this end he is busy with his own thoughts, and not necessarily nice ones. Yet none the less, on his lips and, it appears, in his eyes there already sparkles a smile directed at you. This is a property of the facial muscles, differently developed then ours, emigrants from a country of the far north, where practically since childhood the exclusive importance of the young individual is demonstrated in a sullen, disdainful facial expression. Such importance [vazh-nost’], by the way, will, at a mature age, be considered worthy of respect [u-vazh-enie].

Perhaps the most surprising thing in the American smile is when a beautiful woman suddenly smiles at a passer-by on an empty street. In the Soviet mind-set this would be a significant sign – but here it remains purely formal. Form is pure: from hints and suspicions, from secondary and tertiary meanings, it means only that which the sign itself signifies: a social convention. In such strained conditions, on an empty street at night, a strange woman’s smile is subject to the dangers of an importunate meeting, pursuit, attack, rape – and lightly passes by all misunderstanding, leaving just the ritual, the momentary messenger of social reason. For Americans comprehend such a cordial smile as a refusal of personal relations rather than an invitation to them.

…And so, contrary to the current prejudice, it is possible to establish that Soviet society is the most unconstrained and unceremonious in the world. As soon as some sort of ritual is introduced, usually imposed from above, everyone makes a concerted effort to tear it up and eradicate it – and if it still holds on, then it is only by the cowardice of some and the stupidity of others. In any case, any ritual is considered an outward propriety, unworthy of a great mind or ardent heart. Suspicion of rules is in our blood: the clever and the daring always manage to evade the rules. For this reason Ivan the fool is in fact clever, because he acts contrary to the rules – and gets what is his.

In Russia the ritual is always an obstacle which must be jumped over, gone around, beginning with the charming endeavor of “cutting in line” and ending with the sudden establishment of socialism in a formerly backwards nation. It is not important that in developed capitalist countries they lounge about at the back of lines, submissively awaiting their turn to enter into the kingdom of liberty – we rush to cut people off with our first leaps onto the main road, you see, at a time when, historically speaking, all roads are out – and the locomotive of our revolution, exerting all its strength, will pull behind it all the many compartments of the trailer of history.

Revolution is still this same attempt to cut in line, to disregard ritual. It arises from the impatient desire to live differently then other peoples and nations are accustomed to – and even not as it is delimited by the prophets of the revolution itself. Markets, banks, the bourgeois order of goods and the eventual coming of communism – everything flew off from the onslaught of those in back on those in the front of the crowd which has amassed at the very entrance to the promised kingdom of liberty. A minute before it opens – who will slip in quicker? Whose cunning will play leap-frog with whose honesty? We contrived to forestall even our own time by equated five years with four and mutilating otherwise irreproachable plans with the best of counter-plans.

…And once again we stand at the beginning of all impending paths, neither gentlemen nor comrades to each other, but inmates before an iron door, suddenly flung open from without by an iron boot. What will we say to each other, in real light for the first time, once we’ve gotten a look at our suddenly grey faces and poor clothing?

Will we really begin relations again with this endless elucidation of relations? And will the winding path to mutual respect ever be but one step shorter due to the tiny ritual of the smile? An evanescent [mimo-letnaia] smile. A hypocritical [litse-mernaia] smile. In the sense that man is the measure of all things, the smile is the sign of the commensurability of the human face.

January 1991

Transl. by Thomas Dolack