Ritual and Habit are Useful
Despite my anti-religion stance, I believe that ritual and habits are useful for building a sense of shared experience that identity and shared-boat ethics can coalesce around.
Every year my friend organizes a winter solstice party where the people we grew up with, many who have scattered to the four corners of the country, come back for one night of laughing, drinking, eating, telling stories, and joking around. This connection helps us, in some small way, to grow together rather than growing apart (as the clichéd statement goes).
I believe that social cohesion requires a shared sense of identity and a shared sense of destiny. More than that, I believe that humans need to practice that which they want to be good at. Even things which seem like they are no-brainers. People cannot be optimally "good" unless they practice being good - and that practice will require habits and rituals: habits to build the neural associations between inputs and outputs, and rituals to give an emotional charge to the habits, to influence desires in a way which leads to value ownership.
Every year my friend organizes a winter solstice party where the people we grew up with, many who have scattered to the four corners of the country, come back for one night of laughing, drinking, eating, telling stories, and joking around. This connection helps us, in some small way, to grow together rather than growing apart (as the clichéd statement goes).
I believe that social cohesion requires a shared sense of identity and a shared sense of destiny. More than that, I believe that humans need to practice that which they want to be good at. Even things which seem like they are no-brainers. People cannot be optimally "good" unless they practice being good - and that practice will require habits and rituals: habits to build the neural associations between inputs and outputs, and rituals to give an emotional charge to the habits, to influence desires in a way which leads to value ownership.