Rearranging Ritual: A Conversation With Connor Wood, PhD

Geoff Mitelman: I’m Rabbi Geoff Mitelman. I am the Founding Director of Sinai and Synapses, which bridges the worlds of religion and science. And I’m very pleased and very excited to talk to someone I’ve known for only five years, but it feels like it’s been much longer – my friend Connor Wood, who was actually part of our first Sinai and Synapses group, our first fellowship, which started in 2016.

Connor is an expert in the cognitive and evolutionary sciences of ritual. He received a PhD in religious studies from Boston University with a focus on religion and science. Since then, he’s worked as a postdoc and Research Associate at the Center for Mind and Culture in Kenmore Square. And he is one of the team members who launched Scholarium: Knowledge Reimagined, and we’ll talk about that as well, this new initiative here. But, Connor, I’m thrilled to be able to be sitting with you here this afternoon.

Connor Wood: Yeah, thanks for having me on, Geoff. It’s good to see you. Good to be here.

Geoff Mitelman: So, I want to start with a question that I know you’ve grappled with and talked about and written for many years, which is the challenge of translating academic work into ways that, for lack of better word, normal people can understand.

There’s a very specialized language that happens in academia, and they tend to be very focused on very narrow areas – very, very narrow subjects. And one thing that I know you’re really passionate about is both interdisciplinary work and trying to translate academic work into – I don’t want to say popular – but widespread understanding. So, I’m curious with, really, two questions. One, how and why did that become a problem? And second of all, how do we try to deal with it?

Connor Wood: So, yeah, I think this is just always going to be a challenge, right? Any specialized discourse is going to have to use terms and jargon and have a high-context sort of way of talking about things that’s going to be less accessible to – I’m waving away cottonwood. It’s high summer here in Boston, and it’s actually getting inside the house.

So, you know, 2,000 years ago, somebody who knew nautical terminology really well was going to be able to have a conversation with another sailor or a captain that would not be intelligible to a farmer or to a priest or something like that.

So really, what we’re talking about with academia is just an explosion of the different niches. But it’s not a new kind of problem. I think that we often cast it in almost like a – we hear it talked about almost in a sort of finger-wagging way. Like Steven Pinker, for example – who’s been a guest here before – I think has rightly taken academics to task for writing in too much jargon, not writing in good English.

And at the same time, and I think he’s right, and I have strongly advocated everybody learning to write in English – short words, say what you mean. If you don’t need a jargon word, don’t use it. And that includes even in academic papers. I think that some of the best papers are the ones that are written relatively straightforwardly, because then you know that the writer is actually just trying to convey an idea rather than do a kind of dance or anything.

However, you know, you do need jargon, and you do need a kind of disciplinary focus. You need a toolkit of terms and ideas and Kuhnian terms from the philosophy of science. You need to have a paradigm that people are working with, and there’s no way for everybody to be an expert in all the different paradigms – even within some, within – I don’t know, psychology, right? Being a cognitive psychologist is very different from being a personality or social psychologist. And there are other, even smaller niche domains, like cultural psychology, where people study the difference – the ways that culture influences cognition, which is – that’s not quite social psychology, it’s not quite cognitive psychology.

And what we have in our current environment is just what I would say is kind of the terminus point of a very long period of expansion of higher education and expansion of research, which has enabled lots and lots of specialization. It’s just you have lots of universities; you have lots of people doing lots of things so you can build these little niches. But you know, I think we’ve reached a point where many people think, “Okay, well, we have lots of specialized knowledge, but what does it mean?” You know, you said to understand the meaning of something, you kind of have to go back from the specialization, back towards commonality. And that’s the challenge.

But I just want to reinforce that – I wouldn’t want to lay the blame on academics on as people. Specialization is just part of life. It’s really just something that has come from having lots of money poured into education, lots of resources, lots of people to – so many more people on earth than there were even 100 years ago. There are just more people to dig into different kinds of stuff, different domains. And I think…

Geoff Mitelman: Well, some of it is probably also incentives. And people talk about, and you’ve talked about this too, of how there’s science with a capital S versus science with a lowercase S, of what is the incentive of trying to get a grant, trying to publish, trying to be able to create something new? And people talked about this with the replication crisis in psychology, of trying to create something that’s going to be great, groundbreaking and exciting, but it’s not actually necessarily good science because there are misaligned incentives. And it’s probably not just science. I think it’s probably across all the different domains that we are dealing with.

Connor Wood: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think that’s – I don’t know how to sort of unravel it in our space. This is the kind of thing that you’d need a book-length treatment – and it would be a big book, you know, it would be like a Charles Taylor Secular Age-style book, not a thin little book.

But I do think that the incentives are messed up in a lot of contexts right now, and everybody knows that. And a lot of people are trying to do things about it. It’s definitely not the kind of situation where you can pin all the blame on one set of bad guys and then have a “good guy” group. The “good guys” and “bad guys” is us. It’s kind of an academic version of Solzhenitsyn’s point that the line between good and evil runs right down the middle of every human heart. Every academic is subject to these same negative or sort of pernicious incentives. And most academics, I think, are striving to find ways to do better.

But yeah, I mean, I think a good example of that is – I think that social science funding, for example (this could potentially be slightly touchy for many people) is geared towards finding solutions to problems in ways that are likely to be administrable by foundations or governments or things like that, which could be really good.

But if there’s a problem that needs solutions from just a cultural level, a bottom-up level, the funding is not going to be there often to do that kind of research because, well, the incentives are to find money that will help keep the system going. The system of social science helps prop up initiatives which help prop up the social science, and so forth.

Geoff Mitelman: Yeah, I remember you talked about this almost exactly a year ago. We’re recording this in June of 2021 and we’re coming up on a year after George Floyd was murdered, and the Black Lives Matter protests. And some of the elements that were done – if I’m remembering this – was something that you had written about a year ago, is some of it was actually not necessarily to help Black communities, but to be able to help white liberals feel better about themselves and their own [communities].

We see this in San Francisco, where there are all these conversations about “do we include this person or not this person,” but the funding to be able to support poor communities – that’s not actually there. They want to keep their two-or-three-million-dollar houses and apartments there, because [they’re] trying to be able to say “this is a solution that we’re trying to solve,” but it’s solving the wrong problem at times.

Connor Wood: Yeah. And I don’t even think it’s necessarily about – well, I mean, any kind of moral crusade can be for the purpose of just making people feel better. And that’s definitely not limited to the political left.

If I’m remembering right, I think one thing that I wrote around that time – I just pointed out that a lot of the demands that people were making, especially kind of from the top down – the organizers of a lot of the activism and the protests at that time were, if you, if you stepped back and look at them, were going to have the effect of increasing the number of jobs for white-collar people with Master’s degrees and decreasing the number of jobs for people without degrees, without a college education.

So, for police, policing is one of the last really remaining jobs in the United States where you can make a very good middle-class salary without any need for a college degree. And so, when we were calling for things like social workers to come in and take the place of a lot of what normally would have been police work, like attending to calls with mental health and things like that – you know, there was a little bit of an incentive. If you step back, you could say, well, there’s maybe a little bit of incentive there to say, like, “Wow, we’d like more jobs too,” you know. Nobody likes to think that way; it’s not very nice to think about our moral values being influenced by our material conditions, but they are, you know. And that’s true for me; it’s true for you.

Geoff Mitelman: Look, there’s a great Hasidic (I think it’s a Hasidic) text where they said that, “My neighbor’s material wealth is a spiritual concern for me.” And I, and I, and I think that’s, and that that’s, that’s a hard thing to be able to, to get around. That’s what, you know, I think that’s a big reason why – and we’ve talked about this in previous episodes – so much of Judaism and religion is about economic aspects of life, because that is a huge part, of what are the trade-offs, what are the incentives, how do I put food on the table for my family? And being able to be able to lift up those who need it the most – I think that is a moral and spiritual concern.

And the question is, “Okay, how do we do that effectively?” And I think, very often, there are a lot of places [that say] “I’ve got the answer” without actually starting from the bottom and saying, “What does this community need?” And listening to what the actual population is looking for.

Connor Wood: Yeah, and the actual people. I mean, just because populations aren’t homogeneous, no matter what they are – there really is no such thing as the “Black America’s opinion on X,” because people disagree. People have different values or different life experiences, grow up in different parts of the country, and so forth. So yeah, I think there is a need for a little bit more bottom-up understanding of what people are going through, what people hope for, what they need.

And yeah, that’s a very good point about the emphasis on economic issues in Judaism. And it puts me in mind of the fact there have been a lot of the solutions that kind of emerged out of – I don’t know if you want to call it the academic-industrial, conflict – this thing we were just talking about, where it’ the incentives are a little messed up in some ways because they’re self-perpetuating. A lot of the solutions have been designed in ways that are like, “Everybody should be more like upper-middle-class educated people,” right? That’s the norm. That’s the standard. “We need more education, more people going to college, more people doing X, Y and Z.” That’s going to make them more like this normative culture, which is, interestingly, disproportionately white.

But really, most people – you know, I’m a very firm believer in education. I think everybody should have the education that they want. But I’m also a firm believer that not everybody’s really supposed to go to college. Like, I would say the most people are better off learning stuff that is going to engage them in a way that fits their goals in a different way.

Geoff Mitelman: And I think that’s one of the bigger problems that’s happening in America right now, which is this emphasis and push of “Life and work always overlap.” And I think that’s been interesting of seeing what’s happening with the pandemic, and actually seeing this great article on Naomi Osaka, who’s the tennis player who very, very reasonably said, “Doing these press conferences after my tennis matches is taking a toll on my mental health.”

And someone said, “It’s not ‘here’s how you need to do your work in order to make sure you can protect your mental health.’ It’s like, no. Mental health needs to actually come first, so that your value and your life doesn’t get defined by what other people say work should look like.”

Connor Wood: Yeah. There’s a medicalized sort of understanding of mental health, and then there’s a sort of a richer idea of what mental health is, which is just sort of thriving. That is, mental health is not the absence of diagnosable mental disorders – mental health is a kind of thriving that comes only when people are embedded in communities that are meaningful to them and have ways to participate and contribute to those communities that are good for them, that fit their aptitudes, and have lives that are rich, whether they’re single or married or gay or straight or whatever, Black, white – humans need this.

It’s interesting you brought that up about the problem of life and work overlapping, because that has been a big part of even my own life over the past year-and-a-half of COVID, as my wife and I have been working together in these close quarters. I normally would have this nice kind of bookshelf that you’re supposed to have, as an academic, behind you. But we have this – this is our dining room. So, we have to have a screen to make it possible to have different parts of the house where we’re together.

And as we’ve been home, we’ve just reprioritized a lot of things. We’ve spent so much time reading together. We’re reading The Arabian Nights right now – these tales that we’ve always heard a lot about, but you don’t read them. You watch the Disney movies. But we’re actually reading through them. We’re doing things like that, that just kind of ground you.

Geoff Mitelman: And I mean, I think that’s also – you know, being able to think about, as COVID is, God willing, coming towards an end, I think there COVID also economic disparities that we’ve seen – there were COVID and racial disparities, that COVID has really exacerbated, of those of us who are able to take that kind of time. Also, they’re able to prioritize. And there are some where it’s becoming clearer where that’s not an option for some people. And how do we lessen that gap?

I think being able to ensure a level of mental health that is not just, “Okay, I don’t have mental illness,” but how can I find a thriving life and community wherever I happen to be? And I think there are some systemic pieces of that that need to change in order to make that happen.

Connor Wood: Yeah. I mean, I think there are always systemic issues and problems like that. I do think that there are always ways to prioritize. But I think that what’s difficult is that we’re not incentivized to. There are not many examples of big-name people who are on the news talking about how they just, you know, spent last Saturday, at a – I don’t know, a baby shower for their neighbor down the street or something, you know, bringing them food, or caring for their neighbor across the street or whatever, because those people, people who do that kind of thing, tend not to ascend to the greatest heights of visibility and success. The people who are kind of shaping things, who you see on the big screens, are by definition more likely to be people who have prioritized work and success over literally everything else. And so that becomes the standard and the norm.

But if you are somebody who’s, for example, been a delivery driver for the past year-and-a-half – where you’re not working at home, you’re out there doing these things – I think, no matter where you are in life, prioritizing what seems to be unproductive, what seems to be non-utilitarian, is often the key to a lot of good development in your life.

Geoff Mitelman: Well, that links nicely, because that’s something that we’ve talked about, which is the role of religion. I mean, almost by definition, ritual and religious ritual is non-instrumental, right? Like, in Judaism, you’re not supposed to use the Shabbat candles to read from them, because they’re [not] supposed to be candles – they’re supposed to be purely for their own sake. And we can talk about this with all kinds of different rituals here.

And I’m trying to tease this out as I’m thinking, as I’m speaking – but you’ve been somebody who’s been involved in the religious-studies field, and also identify as somebody who is a member of a church. You identify as a religious person. And there’s an element where people who are in the academic field sort of look down on people who are religious, like, “Why are you doing this? It’s not helping you get to move up in your profession. Why are you bothering to do this? It’s all a bunch of made-up fairy tales. Why are you even spending any time in this kind of way?”

And I think, in large part, because the thick bonds of community are there that I think people find – there’s a lot of research that suggests that the people who have the deepest connection with the religious community tend to be happier and healthier. That, I think, is much more because of the social bonds that are there, and because people will check up on somebody to say, “Hey, how are you doing? How are you feeling? Do you need food? Do you want to go for a walk with me?” You know people in this kind of way. These non-instrumental parts of life are really key, and they often get overlooked.

Connor Wood: Yeah. That’s exactly right. The Catholic theologian Joseph Pieper wrote a short book called Leisure: The Basis of Culture, making, basically, that argument: that ritual – I mean, it’s coming from a Catholic perspective, right, where the Eucharistic ritual is sort of the stand-in for every aspect of life – is, just as you said, sort of for its own sake. It’s intrinsic; it’s not instrumental. You’re not growing food or making money or building a house or anything when you’re doing it.

But I think that the sentiment applies across religions. I was struck, a few years ago, when I had gone to Turkey to give a talk, and I was flying back. The plane had just taken off from Istanbul, and just looking down at all the different little villages on the Turkish countryside, the Thracian countryside, and at every single village – it’s like the spider web of roads that just converged to a mosque at the very center – every one. And the mosque, you know, nobody’s growing food in the mosque. It’s not a marketplace – et cetera. So, there’s just something quite interesting about that.

Now, that’s not true for every religion. Shinto, for example – the shrine is actually often away from the town, off in the woods. But it’s still an important structure. There’s just a way in which these things that are not practical are central, and if you don’t have them at the center, things start to get a little quaky. I think things start to get tawdry.

Geoff Mitelman: And I think that’s a big challenge that we’re facing in American society right now, that there is a level of –and I will admit fully that I’ve fallen into this trap of –for lack of better word, liberal smugness. That happens liberal in a variety of different ways, from an academic perspective, from a scientific perspective – like, “Hey, you idiots, why aren’t you doing what you should be doing?” And that ultimately, I think, becomes very counterproductive. But it’s also not talking in the right language, of what are people really valuing, and trying to say, like, “Hey, why are you not getting vaccinated?” And trying to say, “Well, this is why you should get vaccinated.” That’s not going to convince somebody. I think [we need to] able to hear what are people’s actual real concerns, and it may not be from the Ivory Tower saying, “Here’s what we need to be able to do.”

Connor Wood: Yeah, it probably won’t be. I think the Ivory Tower has lost quite a bit of its credibility for a large number of people, while retaining it or even shoring it up among another group of people. So, it’s difficult to really see how much prestige the brand has lost. The brand of academia, if you’re a progressive person living in New York or whatever – I’m in Boston, you’re in New York – so, yeah, that’s not going to be the right way. I think the last four or five years have shown that kind of shouting at people is just not the right way to change anybody’s mind. It’s just tempting sometimes.

But I think there’s an interesting – I don’t know if we have time to go down this road, but I think a lot about hierarchy. You know, I take a systemic view of culture. Not in the same way that you would in a critical theory sort of way, but I mean really, I look at cultures as systems, as complex systems that are multi-layer, multi-level. They have lots of looping interconnections and so forth. And there’s no way to have a complex system without hierarchy. It’s just kind of like, that’s the definition. But you know, you have to. So, I’m not somebody who thinks that we’re going to ever reach a stage where everybody’s equal. That’s utopia. That’s not possible. You need a leadership, you need a hierarchy, et cetera. But the hierarchy needs to be able to understand what’s going on at the low levels. That’s key.

And there is a sense in which I think academia and journalists and people who think for a living – who work with symbols and writing and ideas for a living – there’s, I think, a bit of specialization. It’s called cultural specialization. Once you get too far specialized down, away from the center, you lose the ability to kind of have a common framework of understanding with people who do something else for a living, or with their lives. And so, I think a lot of the people who are best-suited to kind of doing that kind of translation work are people who have a foot in, have had experience in, both sort of blue-collar worlds, where reality bites back – I mean, that’s a big difference between the world of academia and thought work and, you know, construction or being a mechanic or whatever. You can have all the theory in the world.

There’s a little book Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford. He did a PhD and got tired of it and went and opened a motorcycle shop in Richmond, Virginia. And you know, he just argued, “No matter what theory you think about the part that’s broken, if, if the part doesn’t get fixed, the theory is worthless.” Like, the motorcycle is the thing you’re dealing with – not the theory, and not the schematic, and not the instruction book, for working on this kind of motorcycle. Eventually you kind of have to do ad hoc things. You have to jerry-rig it. You have to figure out what this part is going to be. Just, reality is right there in front of you.

And I think that people who know how that kind of life goes and also know how academia or sort of thought or symbol work goes, because both are valuable.

You know, I think a lot of the rhetoric out there is just partisan. It’s just kind of elevating – like, somehow Republicans have become the party of elevating working class ideals, but without really seeming to actually connect with them. And it’s just – both are needed. Both. They shouldn’t be pitted against each other. You need people who are thinking at a high level, thinking symbolically, thinking abstractly. You also need people who are doing other kinds of work. But if people have had experience with both, and you can kind of get some common ground – we don’t have that right now.

Geoff Mitelman: I think that’s why I know you launched Scholarium. I’d love for you to be able to talk a little bit about that, because I think that’s something that I know you’re trying to do and is really important – of trying to be able to bring some of the academia into real-life questions and in a way that’s accessible and impactful for people.

Connor Wood: Yeah, yeah, I’d love this. So, my, a couple of colleagues of mine and I at Boston University have recently restarted an initiative called Scholarium. Yair Lior is the sort of originator of it. It actually started a few years ago, and then it went dormant for a while, and we’re restarting it. And the idea is: We are, as you said, sort of making academic ideas and topics sort of more touching the ground. But what’s important is that we’re not doing that in a way to like, solve problems. We’re not trying to come up with practical solutions, going back to this right now – not because we don’t care about practical solutions, but because (I kind of didn’t say that right) what we want is to create a space for people to just love ideas, to just relish in pursuing knowledge for its own sake. And one of the kind of contortions of the incentives that we’ve talked about before in academia is just like, anytime you write a grant for any kind of research, you now have to kind of pitch it in terms of how it’s going to help solve problem X or problem Y or whatever.

But really, the Greek root of the word “school” has to do with leisure. It’s something that you do for its own sake. And so, what we’re hoping to do is provide an avenue for learning and teaching for people who are just interested in what their subject is for its own sake – who want to delve into it, share it, learn about it outside of that kind of equation of like, “How is this going to benefit us right now, right here, right now?” while also sort of complementing, rather than reacting against or competing with, universities.

We’re in Boston. It’s the Athens of the modern world. There are so many universities, I couldn’t even name them all. Throw a rock, you’ll hit one. So that’s a good thing for us. That means that this city is just full of people who have spent their lives studying really neat stuff and have all kinds of knowledge to share. And so, the object is to have courses and lectures that bring specialized knowledge out to the public, just because it’s cool.

Geoff Mitelman: There are places like everywhere from Masterclass, with the Great Courses, that kind of program. But it sounds like it’s designed to be more of a community, and people talking and learning from each other, as opposed to “Here’s the expert and I’m going to bring this wisdom to you,” but to be able to have conversations, and to be able to explore these kinds of discussions across different disciplines.

Connor Wood: Yeah, yeah, that’s the idea. Interdisciplinary research is a really key part of it, because interdisciplinarity kind of steps back from all that specialization we were talking about. It’s kind of moving back up the ladder, towards where there’s more common ground, where you can understand how what somebody is doing in this field is relevant to what you’re doing over in this field.

And it’s difficult to find places to do that in the university setting, because universities need to keep their departments sort of well-defined. It’s important, actually, so that you have a standard for what counts as good chemistry or good sociology. If anything goes, then you’ve got a problem. So, you need to keep your disciplines kind of in line, right? I don’t want to say “in a box,” but you need to keep them well defined. So, Scholarium is a place where we might let the universities keep those disciplines pretty well-defined, and we provide a place where you can bring them together and generate something new – cross over ideas.

I mean, that’s where a lot of the really great ideas come from. You know, maybe I’ve mentioned this before – Einstein comes up with, with theories of relativity by mixing up, by joining together, Riemannian geometry and Maxwell’s thermodynamic or electrodynamic equations. It’s just these two cool things, and he brings them together, and then boom! There’s this amazing new thing.

Geoff Mitelman: Well, you were part of our first group in our fellowship, and that’s very much what we were aiming to be able to do – you know, “Let’s get good people in the room across different disciplines and also different religions.” And one thing, and I learned this from, from a program I did with Clal, who’s our fiscal sponsor, of Rabbis Without Borders, is… I very much remember [that] somebody would say something, and that would then spark in me what I was going to say for my sermon for the next Shabbat, or what my next bulletin article was going to be. They had no idea that what they said sparked it in me. And that’s being able to hear things across different disciplines, because you’re also forced to have to speak in English – both in terms of interfaith work and interdisciplinary work. I can speak in a solely Jewish language in the Jewish community, but if I’m trying to communicate to people across different religions and no religions, I need to be able to understand what I’m talking about, and communicate it in a clear way.

Connor Wood: Yeah, which forces you to use language that’s more general and create a space for generality – which doesn’t always sound sexy, necessarily, but it’s so important for sharing ideas.

Geoff Mitelman: Well, I know that you’re talking about music – I believe it’s next week. And thinking about music, it’s so interesting, because music is so critical to every religion and brings out emotions. If you watch a movie without the soundtrack, it’s a terrible movie. You don’t even realize how much the music matters in a movie, for example.

And drama also has that as well. And it’s also an element of being non-instrumental – like on Shabbat, or at camps, whatever. Like, what’s the best thing to do at camp at the end? Try get a guitar, and you go around the campfire and you sing songs. Why? Because it’s good.

Connor Wood: Yeah.

Geoff Mitelman: So, I’d love for you to share a little bit about: What are you playing with here, with music and its relationship with all the different scientific elements, and also the religious and ritual elements here?

Connor Wood: Yeah, I’d love to. Thanks for asking. This is a great example of interdisciplinarity at work, because music is not something you can analyze just down to physics or cognitive science or anything. It’s something that you kind of have to understand from many directions at once.

So, for the last few years, I’ve been investigating music from an evolutionary standpoint – which sounds like it would be really reductive, right? Like, “Oh, we just do it in order to” – I don’t know – attract mates, or something like that. But you go out there, and you actually study people who have done really rigorous, rich studies – cross-cultural quantitative studies – of the role of music in different cultures. [And they] are like, “No, that’s really not” – I mean, that does happen, but there is no one thing that you can say, “This is what music is for always and everywhere,” necessarily. In my reading of it, anyway.

One of the big contenders for a general sort of role of religion, of music, is social bonding. It makes people feel close to one another. But I think David DeSteno, who was one of your previous guests, has done some interesting research on the roles of rhythm. So, synchrony –moving in time with other people – helps people feel bonded, makes them more cooperative, makes them more trusting of each other.

But it’s not clear, exactly – that just opens up lots of questions. It opens up questions about, “Well, how did that develop?” How does that compare with other animals? Well, you find out actually no other animals really do that. That’s intentional synchrony. You know, we’re all over the world. Even if there’s a culture that doesn’t really use instruments or whatever, people will clap, and you’ll have stomping, and you’ll have this ability to just synchronize according to a rhythm, and to create the rhythm themselves. It’s just really cool.

But you’ll never see a bunch of crows doing that on the side of a road, right? You’ll never see dogs doing that. Not even chimpanzees, who are our closest sort of biological relatives. Chimpanzees will get together and have displays that look sort of ritual-like, and maybe even do what you call “chorusing,” where they’re all sort of hooting at the same time. But it’s not synchronized. It’s not on a periodic beat. And that just raises the interesting question of like, well, what was it about this ability – like, what changed? What’s going on biologically with us that allows us to do this? And why would we have come up with it?

So, the research I’ll be talking about next Thursday – I’ll be giving a public lecture on Zoom for Scholarium – is about rhythm, particularly this ability to create rhythm, to sync up with each other. Where does it come from? Why do we do it? Why don’t other animals do it?

Geoff Mitelman: And I’m remembering of a couple of different things. One is from the World Science festival, where Bobby McFerrin did a piece – it was at the 92nd Street Y – about the pentatonic scale. And if you haven’t seen this video, it’s worth seeing. But he gets everybody – it’s 900 people in the auditorium of the 92nd Street Y. And he’s sort of jumping up and down on the stage, and he’s going, “ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba.” And everybody follows exactly what that melody is going to be – which, again, he didn’t teach them to do that. He didn’t know. But there’s a predictive element of, “Here’s what the next note is going to be.” And it brings everybody together. And I think there’s also been research, actually, that at a basketball game, everybody will sing air ball in the same key.

Connor Wood: Exactly.

Geoff Mitelman: That creates that connection there. And what’s also very interesting – there’s some great work that some people at an organization called Hadar [and] a guy named Joey Weisenberg has done wonderful work on music. And in Judaism – at least, on Shabbat – what’s been fascinating is that there are certain musical instruments that are traditionally not allowed on Shabbat. Like, because you’re not allowed to tie, in more traditional circles, there’s not guitar, there’s no piano. I actually love services with guitar and piano. But one of the things that Joey Weisenberg and other people have talked about is, actually, restricting what you’re able to do opens up different possibilities. All we can do is bang on the table or bang on our prayerbook or clap. That actually opens up different avenues and new ways to be creative, of creating that kind of community and musicality.

Connor Wood: Yeah, and I think that’s a beautiful example. And it illustrates the fact that that kind of like simple rhythm – where people are just banging on an object or even clapping hands – is kind of the base-level form of participatory music. If you don’t have flutes, if you don’t have guitars, anything, people have that ability to kind of create a rhythm together, which suggests that it’s probably the oldest form of music, the oldest form of participatory musical activity.

And he pointed out prediction – that people know how to predict, “Okay, well, this melody is going to end up here.” And that’s partly cultural, because we have the tropes that we’ve imbibed from long growing up in a given environment, and different cultures break down the scale differently. But in general, I think that’s exactly right, that music, and especially rhythm, makes us able to predict what’s going to come next at a very, very fine-grained time scale with high accuracy and without any reference. This is what’s important for at least the research I’ve been doing, without any reference at all to what roles or conventions, or sort of differences we might have.

For example, coordination – social coordination in general, at the level of actually moving together and interacting – is the subject of a lot of really cool research in social and cognitive psychology and neuroscience, because it’s actually not easy to say how it is that we can do these things so complexly. There’s even a question about whether animals have joint intentions at all. So, for example, some people will argue that chimpanzees will go out in the forest together and coordinate hunting. So that means that they’re tracking each other’s intentions and moving in relation to one another, as well as to the game that they’re pursuing. But others say that, “No, it’s actually just [that] each chimpanzee is doing his or her individual thing.”

But what we do know is that for people, we interact all the time in what’s called a “mode of joint intentionality.” So, if I’m handing you a board while we’re working together on a fence or something like that, you reach out and grab the board, I move it to make sure that it’s going to meet your hand, we’re both intending the same thing. We’re relating to a third object and to each other at the same time, as a triadic formulation. It’s quite complex, cognitively. And most of the time when we’re interacting, we’re doing so with reference to lots of like higher-level questions, higher-level abstract templates or norms or social scripts.

So, if you go to the bank and you talk to the teller – which nobody does anymore because we all bank online, but whatever, just something normal in everyday life – there’s an idea that you have in your head about how you’re supposed to act given your roles in this situation. In music, you don’t need that. You could interact with each other and sync up at a much finer-grained timescale, with much more accuracy. And you don’t have to think about how you’re different. That’s, I think, one of the keys, is you’re not thinking about these higher-level social scripts. Your brain is just doing this automatic processing of a beat.

Geoff Mitelman: And one of the things that’s interesting about music, and important about music – I’m thinking about the book Thank God for Evolution by Reverend Michael Dowd. And one of the things that he talks about is the difference between day language and night language, of day language being sort of the scientific analysis of, “Here’s what this means, and I’m going to parse this and I’m going to make sure that this is accurate, and I’m seeing things very clearly right now,” versus night language, which is metaphoric, or things that happen in dreams. If you were to say, “Did a snake talk during the day?” Of course not. No snake could have ever possibly spoken at night. That’s no problem in a dream, right? A snake, of course, can talk at night in a dream, or when you get together and around the campfire, and there’s stories that are told – everything from the Homeric stories, to what were the original texts of the Torah, which are oral traditions, to even now getting together, and you tell a ghost story, or you get that the guitar. And that’s an emotional, often very musical piece as well.

And so, we need both of those elements in order to really thrive. We need both the day language and the night language, and without saying, “Here’s what music is,” talking about it in a day-language kind of way, of “Let me be reductive and explain. Okay, it’s this note does this for you.” It’s not like the line from Spinal Tap – “I’ve always found B minor to be the saddest of all keys. It just makes everyone weep instantly.” Like, that’s not actually true. But what does it do on a more emotional, metaphoric level? And I think that’s a question that hasn’t been explored quite as much.

Connor Wood: Yeah. And I think that that ties back into the kind of role that music plays in ritual, because it helps get you out of the daylight view. It brings you to a view where things can – you know, the daylight view, as you’re talking about it, is (I haven’t read that book, but it sounds great), you’re making discriminations. You’re saying, “This is not like that.” You know, “Calcium is not like nitrogen, and this is why, and this is what discriminates that differentiates them between each other.”

And in the nighttime language, or the sort of metaphorical symbolic language, will things become interlinked? A snake is both a snake and a symbol for X, Y or Z, or all three. And ritual is kind of an interesting overlay of both of those, I think, because ritual – we have a tendency, I think, sometimes, to talk about ritual as a thing that bonds people. In a collective-effervescence way, it makes people all feel like they’re part of one unity. But a lot of ritual is actually quite differentiating. I mean, if you actually watch an Eastern Orthodox Christian liturgy, there are many different people doing many different things at the same time – not in synchrony, much of the time. There might be chanting going on, but then there are three priests and a couple of deacons kind of moving in and out and doing different things and going behind the iconostasis wall, and people coming in or out – parishioners bowing and kissing an icon, and all kinds of things. And I’ve seen some similar things in Hindu temples, right, where there is a focal unity, but there’s not necessarily a unity of behavior. People are kind of doing many different things according to different roles.

So ritual kind of does a breaking-apart of the world, in fact. It actually creates distinctions. Like we’ve talked about before, I think, in other contexts, that one thing ritual does is make a binary distinction between social roles or social states. Like, you’re not married, and then you have a wedding, and then you’re married. It’s not like there’s a point between when you’re like, “Oh, I’m kind of married.” No, it’s one or the other. You’re either not the president – inauguration, you are the president. Bing.

So, ritual carves up the world. But then in the heart of ritual, you find music which kind of brings it back together or sort of coalesces it. And the whole thing you can think of as a kind of dance between those two movements.

Geoff Mitelman: And ritual also is very distinctive for a given tradition. So, if you were to come to my synagogue, our taking the Torah out – that’s something that is unique to a Jewish ceremony here. And there are also distinctions – that even in almost all Jewish communities, there are limitations to what non-Jews are and are not allowed to do.

Even the most absolutely left-wing, “everybody is all the same,” kind of [community], there is going to be somebody who’s like, “Nope, this is where we’re drawing the line here.” And it may be very, very, very far to the left, but everyone carves it up in different kinds of ways. When I work with couples and [they] ask, will you officiate at a wedding between a Jew and a non-Jew?

And I say, look, there’s two poles. One is, I will officiate any wedding under any circumstances, no questions asked. And the other pole is, I will officiate only two Jews who observe every single jot and tittle of Jewish law. And I’ve got to plant my flag somewhere in the middle. And so, here’s where I’ve planted my flag, and let’s talk if you’re comfortable with this is where this is. So there’s both the bringing-together, but it does also carve up the world into different communities and different practices.

Connor Wood: Yeah, yeah. And I think that’s fine. You know, I think that there’s a certain aspect to liberal modernity that’s, despite our celebration of the ideals of pluralism, actually quite uncomfortable with difference sometimes – because, you know, we don’t like this idea that those guys over there are doing their thing, and we’re doing our thing, and that makes us different.

But I’m happy to know that each Sabbath in your congregation, you are taking up the scroll and doing these things. And at my church, I’m doing something else. Like, that’s the way the world is. It has different groups, and it has different people. Differentiation as part of the nature of reality. And going back to your point few minutes ago about the emotional or psychological effects of ritual, or being religious – that you have a community and people to help you if things are going wrong, or whatever, or just to celebrate life with.

There’s also, I think, a role that ritual itself plays in kind of stabilizing your psychological state because ritual – tell me to skip it if this gets too like, pedantic – I haven’t talked about this a ton, so I’m not sure how deep to go.

But ritual is inherently cybernetic – not in a computer way, but in the sense that it’s a control system. It reverts to control states at intervals, so that every single year you have a Seder, and when Passover comes, you have the Seder, and you do the same things through the Seder. I mean, there’ll be variations, different people will come and go. Maybe some years things were are clearly different from last year. But you still have a lot of the same elements.

And so, that has to do with the conservative aspect of culture – that small “C” that you talked about with Kate Stockley a few weeks ago. It’s conservative in the same way that an ecology is conservative, right. An ecosystem returns to certain set states cyclically – like through seasons, through oscillations of predator and prey populations, and that kind of thing. Ritual is the same kind of thing. It’s a control system in that way, and becoming part of it, participating in the ritual – actually there’s good evidence, and I’ve built some models, simulation models to kind of examine this – feeds back to structure your own behavior in a way that regulates it. So actually, being part of a ritually-based community is an inherently self-regulatory thing to do.

Geoff Mitelman: Last week, we talked with Annie Murphy Paul, and her book just came out literally today, called The Extended Mind. And one of the things that she and I talked about is that it allows us to sort of offload some of the cognitive challenges that we have. Like, ritual allows us – being able to prep Seder each year, I can know, “Here are the steps that I need to be able to do and here’s what I need to make sure that I’ve got this ready to do.” Or, particularly when there are massive life changes, in moments of weddings or births or death, right – if somebody dies, giving people too many choices, “and here’s what I need to think about” – that’s hard to give to survivors. Or, when our son was born, [when he was] eight days old, “We’re having a bris at our house.” We had to know what to do. We needed to be able to say, like, okay, “Do this and do this and do this and do this and do this.” And having a little bit of hierarchy and ritual made that at least more manageable, rather than being in a sea of unlimited choice.

And that’s one of the things that Annie talks about in her book – that we sometimes think about our brains as brains in vats, and just how wonderful it is when, in fact, so much of our thinking happens in relationship to what’s happening in our environment, and how valuable that is as well.

Connor Wood: Yeah. Because what we’re doing is, we are, like you said, offloading decision points onto the environment. And that could go too far, right? You get to the point where you’re just obeying whatever is kind of in the rules, and that leads you to do things that might not be good. But an example from my own experience is when my wife and I got married, people were asking us, “Oh, boy, are you writing your own vows?” That was so stressful for us. And we’re like, “No, somebody else wrote our vows hundreds of years ago. The whole thing is already set for us. We’re just plugging into a template. It’s already there.”

It was great. I mean, planning a wedding is already stressful because you have to do the invitations and to figure out where to have the reception – all that stuff. But knowing that the ceremony was basically like, all we had to do was pick three hymns and show up, because the tradition was there waiting for us – it made a big difference.

Geoff Mitelman: And I think that’s also an important piece of a lot of life-cycle events. I do a lot of weddings, and a lot of the weddings, on some level, are very similar from one to the other. But what’s different is who’s there. If you had – I don’t know how many people were at your wedding, but let’s say it was a hundred people. If you had a hundred random people that you had never met, it probably it would have been a wonderful wedding, and you and your wife would love each other, but that ritual moment would have probably felt very empty.

What made it special was: Who’s there? Where’s your community, your family, the people that you care about at all of these moments of life? That’s really what becomes so critical, is the social bonds and the social community that we have.

Connor Wood: Well, yeah, and actually I don’t think that they’re separate. I mean, I think that you can’t really have that kind of transition, that clarity, that way of saying, like, “Okay, here’s your new role,” and it’s very clear you are now married, and you weren’t before. And now this comes with new obligations and new rights and opportunities and all these things – you can’t really have that unless you have a group of people around you who sort of give you that structure, that template, that say, like, “This is what we expect marriage to be like,” or whatever – “this is what we expect mourning to be like.”

Which is why it’s very hard – I know that there’s quite a lot of interest in sort of like creation of new rituals, which is, I think a sign of the kind of age that we’re, you know, we’ve become more secular and people are sort of interested in finding out ways to create meaning in their lives in the absence of organized faith or whatever. But it can be pretty difficult to create, out of whole cloth, rituals because they actually, they are inherently an organic thing. They have to come out of a connection with people. So, the bonding is actually part of the regulating, or whatever we were talking about.

Geoff Mitelman: And the role of language – of having it be evocative. You want it to have a certain feel in this kind of way. So, this is something that a lot of liberal Jews have done, which is create new rituals and new language for new things. There are blessings now for, like, transitioning gender. But I don’t think that would have happened a couple thousand, or even a couple hundred, years ago.

But those blessings are evocative of traditional language that brings itself into what the new reality is going to be. And they’re able to find – “Well, this parallels a different kind of transition,” for example, and we can [say] “and so that when that, when that happens…” there’s an evocative element that brings back and connects both to what the past has been, and what the community is, and what the new reality is that they’re trying to enter into.

Connor Wood: Yeah, and I think that’s a universal sort of capacity of ritual, is to retain, sort of conserve some core features while plugging into different contexts. And so that’s how you get such different expressions of a single tradition in different contexts. You know, you find yourself in a different niche with different challenges or different opportunities than your co-religionists across the world – you’re going to come up with different. Some different expressions, some different rituals. You’re going to have different songs. It’s something that is just part of being human: the unprecedented ability we have to plug into different environments and develop culture in a way that links up with those contexts. That’s why we’re the only large mammal to inhabit every continent. It’s just, the extent of flexibility that humans have is really hard to overstate. And this is part of why.

Geoff Mitelman: Well, that’s why the work that you’re doing is so interesting and so important of trying to bridge so many different worlds. And that’s a challenge, to be able to have feet in so many different ponds – or, I can’t even remember what the metaphor is right now, but trying to be able to cross so many different disciplines and religious traditions. So, Connor, thank you for taking some time here this afternoon to explore some of the work that you’re doing.

Connor Wood: Thanks for having me, Jeff. This has been a lot of fun.

Geoff Mitelman: So, if people want to find you, they, they can go to thescholarium.com – that’s where they can find out about you and upcoming events. I’m saying Scholarium, but “Scholarium,” I think is how you were pronouncing it. Correct.

Connor Wood: We’ve been pronouncing it “Scholarium,” but now that you’ve made the suggestion, “Scholarium” kind of sounds pretty cool.

Geoff Mitelman: Sounds a little fancy, right?

Connor Wood: It does, yeah. We’ll talk about that at our next meeting.

Geoff Mitelman: And people can also follow you on Twitter at @SciOnRelOrg.

Connor Wood: That Twitter is actually connected to the center for Mind and Culture. So, in the next few months I’ll be creating my own Twitter account also as I move to do more stuff, to be more involved in Scholarium and other projects. But right now, that is where to reach me.

Geoff Mitelman: So, if you follow him there, when he migrates, you can follow him there as well. He writes really, really interesting stuff on Patheos. You can find me, I’m Rabbi Middleman. On Twitter you can find Sinai and Synapses, @SinaiSynapses. And we’re also on Facebook.

Next week we will be talking with Professor Helen de Cruz, who is a professor of philosophy and writes a lot about the interplay of religion and science from multiple different perspectives. And she’s a really interesting thinker – really excited to be able to talk with her next week, June 15th, the 2p. We have this conversation almost every week, 2pm on Tuesdays. So, we hope you will join us for our next episode of Sacred Science. Thank you all for joining us.