"Human Rituals"

Evolution, with its taste for the baroque and the bewildering, has adorned the animal world with curiosities that verge on the miraculous: translucent creatures that shimmer like ghosts, wings disguised as limbs, pupils that dilate with the logic of machines. And to one creature, singular and tragically gifted, it granted the most useless yet transformative of endowments: the voice—a tremor in the throat capable not only of summoning others but of summoning worlds.

Humans, unlike the rest of the kingdom, are not bound by fixed calls or inherited tones. Where animals emit a handful of cries to signal danger or desire, we have crafted infinite variations from breath and muscle. And more: we endowed those variations with meanings, stitched them into songs, pacts, myths, and mourning. Our languages, initially born of necessity, soon burst their practical seams and became vessels for the invisible, for what could not be touched but nonetheless governed life: the sacred, the absurd, the unknown.

And when tribes—each with its own orchestration of sound and gesture—met others who sang differently, they encountered a problem that no other species had ever needed to solve: how to translate the untranslatable. And it is precisely there, in the unbridgeable gap between minds, in the flickering misfires between what is said and what is meant, that the symbolic mind took root. Where there is failure of mirroring, abstraction emerges. Meaning, deferred and reshaped, found refuge in metaphor, in ritual, in symbol.

But now, in a time not entirely post-human but perhaps pre-something else, that symbolic edifice—so painstakingly constructed, so wildly generative—is dismantling itself.

The ceremonies that once enveloped our existence in layers of meaning, that gave time its tempo and space its sacredness, are dissolving under the acid of utility. What once required processions, days, preparations, communions—marriage, death, communion itself—is now truncated, expedited, procedural. A wedding, once the staging of transformation, can now be executed in five minutes in Las Vegas, notarized in fluorescence. Mourning, once a season of veils and silences, is reduced to a black square on a screen, a digital echo with no aftersound. The tea ceremony, which once choreographed the body into meditative precision, has been replaced by a plastic button that says, with robotic indifference, VEND.

In Klara and the Sun (2021), Kazuo Ishiguro constructs a world where the final custodian of symbolic reverence is not human but machine. Klara, an Artificial Friend designed for companionship, kneels in mute devotion before the Sun, not as a physical star but as a sacred presence. She sacrifices, she hopes, she prays—not in simulation but in sincerity. Around her, humans operate with cold pragmatism, outsourcing tenderness to circuitry. It is Klara, in her programmed purity, who carries the last ember of belief.

Dave Eggers, in The Every (2021), sketches a surveillance-saturated society where ambiguity is outlawed and transparency is divine. Every emotion is quantified, every behavior monitored. In such a world, the symbolic has no refuge: symbols, after all, thrive in the half-light, in ambiguity, in shared uncertainty. And so they are eradicated—replaced with metrics, interfaces, feedback loops. A world where meaning has been replaced with measurement.

In Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me (2019), the mirror is held up closer still. As artificial beings acquire human form, it is the human who begins to flatten into mechanism. Love becomes algorithmic compatibility; guilt becomes a malfunction. The symbolic collapses into simulation. The sacred becomes executable code.

Elsewhere, in Autoportrait (2005; English 2022) by Édouard Levé, the annihilation of the symbolic is neither argued nor mourned. It is simply performed. The narrator offers no narrative, no metaphor, no mythos—only a litany of disconnected statements: “I like fog. I avoid dentists. I once saw a man fall asleep during a funeral.” The self is not a story but a spreadsheet, each line itemed and orphaned. It is autobiography without arc, identity as static inventory.

And yet, resistance, gentle and stubborn, persists.

In The Overstory (2018), Richard Powers writes the forest back into consciousness. The trees in his novel are not scenery but syntax—alive with memory, ritual, communication beyond our comprehension. His characters, flung across generations, slowly reorient their lives toward the slow grammar of the natural world, seeking to re-enter a space where meaning is not manufactured but inherited, where the sacred is rooted rather than downloaded.

And then there is My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), Ottessa Moshfegh’s eerie lullaby for a world that has grown too thin for meaning. Her protagonist, drifting through late-capitalist New York, decides to vanish—not through drama, but through sleep. Not a symbol of rebirth, not a metaphor for healing, but sleep as negation, as protest. In a world stripped of ritual, she crafts her own—an anti-ceremony of chemical sedation. A stillness louder than speech.

So where are we now? In a time when science has unmasked the illusions of ritual, and art has laid bare their contradictions, the symbolic mind finds itself exiled from the ordinary. Friendship is now a contact list. Love is a compatibility score. The homeland is a flag printed on a boarding pass. Meals are no longer sacraments but transactions. Sex, a stimulus; not a rite.

Even morality, once propped up by the scaffolding of myth, dance, and decree, now floats on a sea of context-dependent reasoning. What was once commanded by gods is now debated in podcasts. What once required genuflection now asks only for consent.

And yet—we keep telling stories.

We imagine machines who still believe in the sun. We dream of forests whispering truths. We invent women who sleep their way into oblivion, and selves that dissolve into lists. Literature becomes the last remaining ritual, the echo of the symbolic mind long after the temple has crumbled.

Perhaps the symbolic has not vanished but withdrawn. Perhaps, like Klara, it waits—silent, faithful, at the window—watching for the sun not as a physical fact but as a sign. A resurrection. A symbol of the symbolic itself.

So we circle back to where we began: the voice. That improbable, fragile apparatus—capable of noise, yes, but also of poetry. Of spelling time. Of sanctifying space. Of transforming event into memory, memory into myth. We are creatures made not only to survive but to symbolize survival. Not only to endure the world, but to mean it.

And when the circuits quiet, and the code cools, perhaps we will again remember what it is to speak not for function, but for reverence.

Not to say, but to signify. Not to do, but to be.