There seems to be a kind of person who really, really wants a job which consists of conducting rituals rather than doing something where the outcome matters. That’s not illegitimate. Rituals matter to community. But I think we’ve made way too many secular priests.

Perhaps the chief example I’ve seen of secular priests are academics. Not all, of course. Hence why some people like to focus on STEM¹. But a lot of them. And a big part of the problem with these secular priests is that the rituals they do are hidden away. They’ve become untethered from the community they (theoretically) serve.

This is a partial explanation for why people are getting PhDs with dissertations that argue that complaining about smells associated with the transmission of disease is racist. I’m sure the academic who wrote that convinced herself it’s true, but that wasn’t the point. The point was writing a dissertation. If it wasn’t this topic, it was going to be something. The point wasn’t the contents of the book, but the book itself. The point wasn’t what was said in the viva voces (aka thesis defense), the point was that things were said in from of a thesis committee. The point was the performance of the ritual.

In itself, the point being the performance of the ritual is not necessarily a problem. Rituals, by their nature, exist because doing them has some benefit apart from the things they effect. In this case, though, the ritual is completely divorced from the community that the ritual is supposed to unify. The result is that the ritual has become weird.

I started out by saying that the people who want to be secular priests want jobs where outcome doesn’t matter, but that’s not actually an accurate description of what priests do. If you look at any religion which has existed for centuries, you will see that its rituals change over time.

Sometimes more, sometimes less, but they change.

This is because the authorities responsible for the rituals are in touch with the people and look at the effect that the rituals have, and modify them. Sometimes it’s explicit, as in the case of the Catholic Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, which publishes authoritative manuals on how rituals are to be performed within the Catholic Church. Sometimes it’s just that some rituals are more popular than others and the popular ones survive while the unpopular ones wither away. But whatever the mechanism, the rituals change over time in response to changes in the people and how existing rituals affect them.

In Academia, which is a secular religion that’s been around for perhaps a hundred years or so, we’ve managed to create a secular class of priests who conduct all of the rituals behind closed doors. Which means that there’s no feedback loop on what effect the rituals are having on the community, which means that the only feedback loop is on what effect the rituals are having on the secular priests. This has the effect of being an unchecked amplification loop, as each new generation of academics tries to outdo the previous one, and doesn’t really try to do anything else.

And I don’t think that it has entirely escape the notice of the academics that their rituals aren’t doing anyone any good. In fact, I suspect that’s one reason why insane² social justice movements have become popular with them. They must be insane, because otherwise they would just be ordinary work where the outcome matters. But they are about social justice because this has a (theoretical) relationship to the community to whose benefit the rituals are done.

On some level, they know that they’re supposed to be doing someone some good.

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1. “Science Technology Engineering and Math”

2. I mean that the means have no rational relationship to the goals and no reasonable person would think that the proposed means would achieve the stated goals.