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So. You want to run a Secular Solstice. You’ve got a great secular community – maybe a large group, maybe just a few friends and family. Regardless, you want to be able to share a sense of awe and wonder. You want a holiday that feels sacred, yet rooted in a reason-based worldview.

How do you get started?

In the longterm, ritual evolves. It travels from family to family, culture to culture, adapting to fit the needs of particular communities. But it’s helpful to have a concrete vision of what a Secular Solstice *can* look like, to use as a springboard.

This is a step-by-step tutorial on putting together a Solstice event.

An Arc of Light and Darkness

To be clear, there’s plenty of valid ways to celebrate a “Secular Solstice” (that is say, a Solstice  that is secular). A family dinner. A wine and cheese cocktail party.

But there’s a quality that the Brighter Than Today Solstice has, which makes it particularly compelling, which few non-religious events have: the emotional arc.

It begins light, enthusiastic and joyful. It transitions into somber contemplation. Candles are gradually extinguished, until a single candle remains. Someone tells a personal, vulnerable story about the hardships they or the community have faced. The story ends by finding good reasons to hope, to keep trying, even in the face of absolute darkness.

Then the lights are reignited. You sing together about the world humanity has built together, and the future you will help create.

The Solstices I’ve run typically take 2 hours. They’re about 75% music and 25% stories/speeches/readings. This isn’t strictly necessary. The most important part is the Light-Darkness-Light arc, and there are different ways you could accomplish that. Some people don’t care about music as much, and prefer more storytelling, or like to experiment with other group activities. That’s fine.

This tutorial will emphasize music, but the goal is to undertake a journey together, to confront the most difficult truths you face without resorting to comforting lies. And to come out the other side stronger and excited to be human.

Here’s an outline of the sections to come:

1. Material Components: Things you need to run a Solstice
2. The Arc Breakdown
3. Selecting Music (Coming… I’d like to say soon. Let’s just say “someday”. A lot of the more essential bits are covered in the Arc Breakdown.)
4. Symbolic Food (Also coming “someday.” Basically, I think it’d be great for smaller groups to have a Solstice framed around a multi-course meal, where first course is things hunter-gatherers could eat, such as nuts and berries. Second course is things like bread that early agricultural people would eat. The later courses could have deliberately modern food that wasn’t possible until the 20th century)

“What do you do?”

“Me? I’m a photographer. You?”

“Oh, I invent rituals.”

My cocktail party conversations have gotten a bit more interesting since I started the Secular Solstice.

I’ve gotten loads of positive feedback about the Solstice. People have come up to me, thanking me profusely for creating something they didn’t even know they needed.

But when I first mention it, and then try to explain what I mean, there are two common reactions: bewilderment, and fear.

In this article, I’ll be taking on the first of those reactions. Continue reading “Secular Christmas Isn't Good Enough (for me)” →

A Warning About Stories

I see life in stories.

Narratives sprawling, intertwining. Life is like a collection of long running television shows, each with their own main characters and side plots, but with frequent crossovers. Seasonal arcs, occasional cliffhangers. Plots culminate and resolve… usually. Sometimes you get the sense the writers don’t really know what they’re doing, and a plot thread is left dangling. Sometimes a show drags on longer than it should because the ratings are good.

But occasionally, you get a satisfying series finale, and a long-running story ends (although it might leave a spinoff series behind).

It’s fun to look at life this way. And it can be more than fun – poignant, and beautiful.

Also really dangerous.

The universe is built out of causes and effects, and mathematical relationships. And the math doesn’t care about good guys and bad guys and making sure that things have happy endings. Or even compelling, tragic endings that teach us valuable lessons. Bad things happen, sometimes for no reason.

If you go through life thinking that everything is an adventure and things will just work out, you’re likely to encounter a rude awakening or two. You may, in fact, just die for a stupid, pointless reason.

I begin with this warning, because I’ve found myself in the business of selling ritual, storytelling, and adventure to people, within the framework of rationality.

I believe that’s important. But I don’t deny that what I’m doing is dangerous. All the more so if I’m actually successful.

Narrative thinking is the default state for most people. Human brains were bred over millions of years to find patterns in the math around us, and to use stories to interpret those patterns and teach them to others. So even though life is not made out of stories, the stories we’re trained to see are not hard to find.

We’re not very good at math, but intuition and storytelling are pretty decent at helping small tribes of hunter gatherers to figure things out, survive, and have children.

But it’s not that great for making decisions about a modern economy, for evaluating scientific research, for deciding how to have an impact on a global scale. It’s not even that great at deciding how to run a small business. Or even how to be happy, in the modern world, increasingly different from the ancestral environment where we did most of our evolving.

Reason matters, whether you’re making decisions for yourself, or for the world around you.

It’s well and good to acknowledge that you should be more rational. But actually making that change is a lot of work. It’s often counter-intuitive, fighting your own natural psychology. It’s nigh-impossible to do alone. I’m writing this today because my life was changed dramatically, by having a community of people who are earnestly curious about the truth, who earnestly want to do good in the world, even if it means changing their minds about important things, and feeling silly about having been wrong in the past.

I’ve watched people become wiser, stronger and happier, because they share a community, a culture. My own life was transformed by having stories and ritual that helped

Stories and ritual are dangerous, but they’re also among the most powerful things in the world, and if we’re going to build a more rational world, I think we’re going to need them.

Tonight, people in Boston and New York City and possibly elsewhere celebrated Petrov Day. The holiday was created by Jim Babcock, for people who are concerned about developing technologies that might destroy humanity’s future – among them, nuclear war, climate change, bioengineered plagues and artificial intelligence.

This is intended for small audiences, up to about 8, and for people who are already familiar with the ideas behind the ritual.

In New York, we tried a few new ideas, deviating from the original script when we thought it appropriate. This article is a review of our execution of the holiday. I highly recommend you read the script for the ritual first, so you understand the context.

(Seriously, go read the script before continuing to read).

….

…ready?

Okay, here we go:

Overall Review

A common theme of rationalist holidays is “let’s go through the story of human progress and tell stories about.” When Jim started creating Petrov day, at first I worried “oh no, another holiday retreading the same ground.” But I think Jim did a much better job than anyone else I’ve seen, at telling that story well and making it emotionally significant.

Some of that emotional salience was lost due to technical snafus. I expect that to go better in future years. I also think there’s plenty of room to experiment and improve the ritual.

But it felt good to be surrounded by a small group of people that took the same ideas as me seriously. It was fun. It had dramatic tension both from intellectual content and from the literal dangers of the candles.

I do worry about ritualizing particular concrete ideas, as opposed to overarching values. Particular ideas can turn out to be less relevant than you thought they were, or in some cases be actually false.

At the same time, some ideas are important to take seriously, and ritual is a good tool for that. My tentative solution is to recommend people doing rituals like Petrov Day, but not necessarily doing them every year. Instead, I think we should develop a collection of rituals that have a similar overall theme (say, committing to help the future of humanity in concrete ways), but rotate which ritual you do each year, so we don’t get too attached to a particular execution of that theme (for example, Artificial Intelligence).

I’ll say more about this in a future blog post.

On to the technical points about the ritual, how we executed it, and how others might learn from our example.

Candles

The original script called for a menorah or similar candelabra, to hold 6 candles. Six of them symbolize human progress:

• The invention of fire
• The invention of agriculture
• The invention of writing
• The invention of the scientific method
• The invention of industry
• The invention of computers

And then, two final candles (traditionally set to the far right of the candelabra) that represent Friend and Unfriendly Artificial Intelligence – two potentially powerful technologies that could bring about great good or great harm to the world.

We didn’t have a menorah, so instead we made due with 6 tea candles. For friendly and unfriendly artificial intelligence, we used an empty candle holder stuff with matches.

We learned a few interesting things from that experiment:

1. You need to light one candle with a previous candle (showing how, say, writing enabled the scientific method to develop). This can’t be done directly with tea candles, but we made do using additional matches that we lit from the previous candle, and then used to ignite the next one.
2. Using a huge cluster of matches for AI was a very good innovation. At the end of the ceremony, you hold the candle of computation near the candle of AI – consciously highlighting the risk that humanity might invent a superintelligence, and then choosing not to. A concern of mine was that this would feel underwhelming. It’s meant to reflect the gravity of Stanley Petrov’s decision, but there’s no real temptation to light the last candle.By contrast, a giant swarm of matches is really tempting to set ablaze. We had each person hold a match near each of the two AI match-masses, and people were inching closer and closer, creating a moment that was fun while still intense, a good emotional climax to the evening.
3. If you’re placing the candles in circle instead of a straight line (as on a menorah), it’s easy to get confused about which one is which. You can solve this by just using the traditional straight line, or marking your candles more distinctly.
4. Make sure to have large enough candles that they don’t burn down during the ceremony. We had to replace one.
5. The script calls for a fire extinguisher. A first aid kit would also be valuable. Someone accidentally burned themselves and missed part of the ceremony. This actually made the ceremony feel more interesting (even to the person that burned themselves), because it highlighted the potential danger in a very visceral way (without being genuinely dangerous – she’ll heal in a day or so). But having burn cream on hand would be worthwhile.
6. On a related note – I gave everyone a glass of water before the ritual, so that if they got thirsty the ceremony wouldn’t be interrupted. I didn’t even realize that this doubled as additional fire safety (and place to put your fingers if they get burned)

The Problem of Darkness

We conducted the ceremony at night, with the lights dim. It was hard to read from the book unless you were holding a flashlight, which we passed around, or a candle, which wasn’t always available.

Not everyone read very clearly our loudly, so sometimes we had to strain just to hear what was being said, and it was hard to feel the emotion of some words because we were struggling just to understand them intellectually.

I’m not sure what a good solution is. The ceremony very much feels like it should be held in darkness. Raising the ambient light would diminish the mood. Giving everyone a flashlight might make the candles seem underwhelming. Using a projector (as I do in the Winter Solstice to solve this problem) isn’t really appropriate.

Suggested Changes

• The booklet says not to read the italicized sections that describe actions to take (such as “take the candle that symbolizes industry, and use it to light the candle of computation“). But since it’s dark, and since different people read at different speeds anyway, I think it’s better to read that all aloud. That way it’s clear what’s symbolizing what, and the pacing of the event is more consistent. (The most important instance was when someone dropped three drops of wax on our cherished memories, and most people didn’t even notice)
• The script suggests that just one person holds a candle near the AI candles. I think it makes for a better, more participatory ending for everyone to hold matches up to it (and again, to use a giant array of matches that look like they’ll explode awesomely if lit) ((while making sure to have adequate fire safety if things go wrong, of course))
• ((Actually, it may be correct not to actively encourage random people acquiring the script to do slightly more dangerous things, since random people on the internet may not read all the instructions or take enough precautions. But I think it’s a good idea for groups that have taken the time to prepare and be safe to add an element of (mild) danger))
• A few sections call for a candle to pass around. I think it should be highlighted that the candle should be passed around slowly, deliberately, taking time to experience what the candle represents.
• Many of the quotes begin with long, technical language, that makes them hard to understand. After you read the name/date at the end of the quote, it’s clear what’s being talked about. But this means the first half of each quote is spent trying to figure out what’s going on, instead of being emotionally affected by it. I think a simple solution is to begin each quote with the name and some context. (Keeping it mysterious until the end is sort of cool if you’re reading it, and can go back and reread it. But a ritual of spoken words doesn’t work that way, especially when it’s conducted in the dark and is hard to see)

New Innovations

We tried a few new things, most of which went well:

1. We had an ornate hourglass in the center of the altar. The ceremony takes a bit under an hour to complete. However, if you don’t know what you’re doing and stumble through some parts, or if the ceremony is interrupted, it’s plausible we could fail to complete it in time. The visual reminder adds a sense of urgency.
2. Soundtrack – we conducted the ceremony alongside the soundtrack of Tron Legacy, which turned out to be a very good fit. Not only is the general “ambient orchestral techno” a good atmosphere for a story of human progress and dangers of technology, but the soundtrack very nicely synced up with the content of the event. Sad music started playing when we read about the Black Death. Exciting techno beats began right as we got to the rapid progress of science. Ominous music began playing as we led up to world war 2, and hit a crescendo right as we read a quote from Hitler.
3. We stumbled a bit during the ceremony. If we hadn’t stumbled, we would have completed the ceremony right as the soundtrack ended. Instead we were late by a few minutes. This prompts an idea:

Petrov Day always seemed to me like it should have risk of failure. So here’s my proposal for that: Use a soundtrack of similar length (about 45 minutes), and an hourglass.

If you take longer than an hour, the ritual fails, and you get the “bad” ending – you light the candle of Unfriendly Superintelligence.

If you complete it in under an hour but after the soundtrack finishes, you get the neutral ending (neither of the two candles are lit)

If you complete it during the last song of Tron Legacy you get the best ending: light the candle of Friendly Superintelligence.

But we don’t want to encourage people to rush through the ceremony without feeling the meaning of the words, so if you complete it before the last song of Tron, you also get the bad ending (which is appropriate, since rushing ahead with technology is the exactly the thing we’re concerned about).

This is obviously gameable (you can rush a bit, and then slow down at the end if need be), but I think the emotional incentives are actually pretty good. If you rush too fast, you’ll lose… but losing is actually pretty cool too (you get to light a giant conflagration of matches), so you’re not really motivated to cheat. But winning is just hard enough to make you feel proud to win or get the neutral ending.

Celebration

After the ritual, we all felt like we had won, and wanted to celebrate. We also really wanted to destroy something, having just painstakingly not set a crazy tower of matches on fire, and that needed an outlet.

As it turned out, we had a recently completed Earth Puzzle

What we ended up doing was tossing the puzzle ball in a circle, hot potato style. We started singing the chorus of my song “Move the World”, and then started chanting it faster and faster and tossing the ball faster and faster until it fell apart.

This… in some ways goes against the entire spirit of the event. But it was super fun, which is probably more important. (One could create a new chant that gradually escalates to somehow talking about the world being turned into computronium, which can be either good or bad, which may make for a reasonably cathartic ending).

It also suggests a before-the-event-activity: slowly putting a world-puzzle together. (You can leave the puzzle out on the table as your guests arrive, surrounded by cheese and crackers and some light music for a pre-Petrov Day hangout).

We also felt, more generally, that we needed more good music after the event. Someone spontaneously started singing:

We got the whole world, in our hands…

With subsequent verses improv’d:

We got the whole future, in our hands
We got the Moon and Mars, in our hands
We got the solar system
We got the local cluster
We got the Milky Way
We got the whole light-cone

It’s the sort of thing that sounds really lame and childlike, but honestly fit the occasion perfectly and felt really fun.

Then we sang “we will rock you” because we were feeling epic.

On September 26th, 1983, the world was nearly destroyed by nuclear war. That day is Petrov Day, named for the man who averted it. Petrov Day is now a yearly event on September 26 commemorating the anniversary of the Petrov incident.

The purpose of the ritual is to make catastrophic and existential risk emotionally salient, by putting it into historical context and providing positive and negative examples of how it has been handled. This is not for the faint of heart and not for the uninitiated; it is aimed at those who already know what catastrophic and existential risk is, have some background knowledge of what those risks are, and believe (at least on an abstract level) that preventing those risks from coming to pass is important.

Petrov Day is designed for groups of 5-10 people, and consists of a series of readings and symbolic actions which people take turns doing. It is easy to organize; you’ll need a few simple props (candles and a candle-holder) and a printout of the program for each person, but other than that no preparation is necessary.

Organizer guide and program (for one-sided printing) (PDF)
Program for two-sided print and fold (PDF)

Winter is coming once again. In the next few weeks, we’ll be launching a kickstarter for the 2014 Solstice. But first, we need to wrap up some loose ends from last year!

First of all, the album is now online. Those who purchased it as a kickstarter reward from last year have already received it, but the rest of you can find it at humanistculture.bandcamp.com!

We’re hard at work finishing up the Hymnal. Here are some more sample page-spreads! First up, a group photo from the Bay Area Solstice last year, and the first page of a guided meditation through the universe:

Next, a new song about secular movement building:

And finally, Bitter Wind Blown, one of the most popular songs from the 2013 Solstice:

We’re aiming to have the hymnal completed by the end of the week and shipped to the people who ordered it last year. It’ll also be available again as a kickstarter reward this year. The hymnal will feature:

• Lyrics to original music from last year as well as the upcoming 2014 Solstice.
• Photos from the large NYC Solstice last year, as well a private solstice held in the Bay Area.
• Stories, essays, and poetry
• It currently clocks in at about 120 pages.

Looking forward to sharing the finished product with all of you!

Yesterday, I walked alongside my friend Thomas for half an hour, to the clearing in Prospect Park where I would officiate his wedding. It was blistering hot. Sweat poured over my forehead and onto my black suit like a waterfall.

At the moment we arrived at the clearing, clouds rolled in, opened up, and dumped bucketloads of rain onto us as we waited for his fiance Allison to lead the wedding participants to us. It was ironic, because the rain made the wedding both far more interesting and far more comfortable.

Eventually Allison arrived, leading wedding guests through the park to where Thomas and I stood waiting. The three of us stood before them, barefoot feet against the wet earth.

I gave a wedding speech, which I think is helpful to share here – both as a general example of a secular wedding sermon, as well as a demonstration of why weddings are important in the first place.

We have gathered here today, weathering trials of fire and water, to celebrate the wedding of Thomas Eliot and Allison Rae.

And whenever people gather to celebrate a wedding, it begs a certain question:

Why?

Seriously, why are we doing this? It’s a pretty legitimate question.

Thomas and Allison love each other. They’ve been together, they’ve lived together, for years. And within three months of meeting each other, they knew they wanted to be together forever.

They’ve traveled to the bottom of the sea and explored lost temples on jungle mountaintops. They’ve endured external tragedies and interpersonal strife. They took those issues head on, they have explored their needs and values, learned from each other, grown together.

Allison and Thomas are a team. They’re adventuring partners that have already proven they can take on the world together. This wedding isn’t changing that.

So, why are we doing this? Why do humans all over the world, across all cultures, throughout history, think weddings are important?

Continue reading “Why Do Weddings Exist?” →

One of the best existing resources for bringing ritual into a humanist life is the book Secular Wholeness, by David Cortesi.

The book is available online. On the whole, it’s a useful book for people who are thinking of leaving their religion, and aren’t sure how they can find meaning without a religious community. But the chapter on ritual stands out as an excellent introductory text on what ritual is, why you should care about it, and how you can create it for yourself.

The chapter on ritual is here, and if I tried to summarize the important bits I’d probably end up quoting the whole thing. But several points form important building blocks, that I’ll be discussing further on this blog.

 

What is a Ritual?

Is brushing your teeth a ritual? Is your morning cup of coffee, or your weekly workout with your gym buddy? The answer is “maybe.”

There’s a hazy boundary between the words “ritual,” “habit,” and “custom.” I think the difference between a ritual act and a habitual one lies inawareness and assent . An act becomes a ritual for you when you perform it with conscious awareness of its symbolic and emotional meaning, and with willing assent to those meanings. Unless you act with both awareness and assent, your act is merely a habit (if it is unique to you) or a custom (if you share it with others).

Awareness and intention are personal qualities that can exist only in your own mind. They cannot be coerced. Nobody can force you to pay attention to the symbolic meaning of an act. And in particular, nobody can force your assent to the meaning of a ritual. As I well know, because I can remember myself as an adolescent, being required to attend my parents’ church in which I no longer believed. My body was present at the rituals; my willing assent was most definitely and defiantly not.

He later goes on to note:

Any act you want can become a personal ritual. Take that regular Tuesday noon jogging date with your friend Alex. If it’s just a run and a pleasant chat, it’s a habit and no more. However, occasions like these can become rituals if you make the conscious decision to be mindful of their implications: what they stand for, what they imply, how they represent your status and condition of life. Suppose that while you are lacing your running shoes, you think: “At this time I am going to connect with the outdoor air, with the weather and the season. I’m going to be aware of my body, its strength and limits, how it feels to get tired and to recover. And I’m going to attend to Alex, who is a friend.” And you would consciously try to bring awareness of these points into the front of your mind several times during the run.

Why is Ritual Useful?

Secular Wholeness describes four major uses of ritual:

• They give time-structure to our lives on the daily, weekly, and annual levels.
• They assist and encourage the formation of trust and community between people.
• They give shape to public expressions of powerful emotions: expressions of grief, as at funerals; and of joy, as at weddings, graduations, birthdays and anniversaries.
• They help to reorient and stabilize our own feelings when we need to comprehend and cope with crucial life passages.

The book primarily focuses on creating “personal” rituals – events and activities tailored for you, your family and your particular community.

I think the principles there are important building blocks. What I’d like to see is how to apply them to create a broader culture, so that individual families and small to medium communities can feel connecting to something large and profound.