Posts Tagged ‘culture’

“Ritual: A Philosophy of Necessity”

September 20, 2025

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Ricardo Morín
New York Series, Nº 5
54″ x 84″
Oil on canvas
1992

Preface

This essay seeks to define rituals without reliance on metaphors, abstractions, or moral judgments.   The method of this essay begins with etymology, then traces its biological foundation, and follows the extension of ritual into human conduct.   Ritual is treated as repetition with form, carried out by necessity to contain forces uncontrollable by command or intention.

The analysis will distinguish ritual from belief and superstition.    Belief attributes power beyond immediate function.   Superstition arises when belief assigns causality where none exists.    Ritual is not a belief, but only a procedure.   Its function is to regulate life through ordered repetition.

The chapters that follow address the principal domains in which ritual operates.   In sexuality, ritual prevents destabilization by giving desire a form through which it can move without collapse.   In distrust, friendship, enmity, and love, ritual contains states that resist control and makes them livable.   In governance, ritual holds ideological differences within limits that preserve continuity of community.

Ritual is necessary for existence.   It does not eliminate instinct, emotion, or conflict.   It gives them form and allows life to continue without disintegration.   This necessity is not external, but generated by life itself.   Where forces exceed control, ritual provides order.

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Ricardo Morin. September 12, 2025, Bala Cynwyd, Pa.

I

The word ritual comes from the Latin ritus (a prescribed act performed in an ordered manner).    Its essence is repetition.   To speak of ritual is not to speak of tradition or abstraction, but of a necessity carried out for primal longing.

The biological basis of ritual is clear.   In many species, conflictive instinctive drives are contained by repeated actions which reduce uncertainty.    Birds perform dances before mating.   Wolves display submission to prevent attack.    Primates groom one another to ease tension.    These actions do not alter the external world.    They do not ensure mating, nor prevent danger, nor eliminate aggression.   They work by regulating behavior in ways preventing destabilization.    They arise from necessity:   without them, reproduction, survival, or cohesion could be placed at risk.

Human conduct extends this biological principle.    The handshake is a repeated act signaling non-aggression between strangers.   A funeral orders grief into sequence and allows the bereaved to endure loss.    A meal shared among people affirms cooperation and reduces the possibility of conflict.   Not one of these actions are effective because of a belief in causality.    They are effective because they are the product of repetition and recognition within the group.   They are necessary because without them, mistrust, grief, or rivalry would remain uncontained.

Instinct and emotion generate uncontrolled command or intention.   Repetition gives them form without elimination.    Herein lies the necessity:    life produces forces beyond control, and ritual provides their procedure without collapse.    Thus further inquiry rests here.

II

Belief begins where an act or event is taken to hold power beyond its immediate function.    To believe is to attribute meaning not evident in the act itself.   Belief provides orientation, but also creates vulnerability.

From belief grows superstition.   Superstition occurs when a gesture, a sign, or an accident is taken to determine good or bad luck.   Breaking glass is said to bring harm.   A number is said to bring luck.    The act or sign is given power it does not possess.    Superstition is belief that’s misdirected.   It relies on the conviction that external hidden forces govern external events and become accessible through signs and gestures.

Ritual does not depend on belief that an act can change fate or invoke hidden power.   Its effectiveness does not rest on what is imagined but on what is enacted.   A handshake obviates mistrust because it is repetition and recognition, not because of its magic.   A funeral allows provides ordered sequence and allows grief, but it does not alter death.   A meal shares cooperation through its mutuality, not because it calls luck.

The distinction is exact.   If ritual is the form, desire is the current that moves within it. Religious traditions have often cast desire as a deficit, a disorder, or a temptation to be repressed.   But desire is neither deficit nor disorder; it is vitality itself:   an energy that presses toward expression.   Ritual does not restrict this force; restriction belongs to fear and suffering.    Ritual contains fear and keeps excess within the limits of endurance and necessity.   Fasting, for example, does not abolish hunger but holds it in rhythm; it makes appetite a measure rather than a punishment.    By contrast, a prohibition that denies the legitimacy of desire transforms vitality into anxiety altogether.    In this way, ritual and desire are not opposed but interdependent:   the former is the channel, the latter the stream.

III

Sexual drive is pervasive in human life.    Left without form, it destabilizes both the individual and the community.    Its power lies in persistence.   Command cannot dismiss desire.   Desire presses for expression.    Every culture has developed rituals to contain and to regulate it.

Yet the grounds of sexual ritual are not repression but replication.    Nurture marks the human condition from birth:    in lactation, nurture consists in being fed, held, and sustained through another’s body.    In this original state, intimacy secures survival.    Later, desire repeats the structure.    The quest for union is both a return to that first condition of dependence and a transformation of it into adulthood.    Sexual ritual prolongs that first experience:    it carries within it the imprint of nurture.    It is not a matter of shame or judgment, but of continuity.

Courtship is the model.   Repeated gestures mark the approach to intimacy.   Ceremonies (words, gifts, dances) structure the encounter.   Desire is not eliminated, but gives form to sexuality and allows it to proceed without immediate conflict.    Marriage extends the process and establishes rules for its conduct within a recognizable frame.   Ritual transforms a disruptive force into a relation that can be carried within order.

Different cultural examples exemplify the variety of this process.    In Japan, tea ceremonies and formal visits have structured the first stages of marital negotiation.    In Victorian England, the presence of chaperones functioned as a mode of surveillance and set boundaries for courtship.   Among the Navajo in North America, the Kinaaldá ceremony marks a girl’s transition into womanhood and links individual desire and fertility with the continuation of the community.   In each case, ritual does not extinguish instinct but channels it into social life.

When desire cannot be enacted without risk, individuals turn to patterned acts that provide release without collapse.    Monastic traditions across cultures developed rituals of celibacy, which are supported by prayer, fasting, and other disciplines, containing sexual force.   In everyday life, other people turn to imagery (fantasy, dream, or artistic representation) and stage symbolically acts they long for but cannot realize.   Still others establish habits (exercise, meditation, or creative work) that redirect sexual energy into manageable outlets.   Longing, however, is not erased.   Its structure makes sure that desire moves within set limits without becoming overwhelming.

Obsession arises when desire remains unresolved and intrudes upon thought; it repeats itself without relief and it threatens stability.   Ritual is a way to contain obsession.    Through repetition, it acknowledges the force and gives it shape.    Though not eliminated, it has boundaries.

Ritual in the sphere of sexuality is not an option but a necessity.   It provides form where instinct would exceed measure.

IV

Reason alone does not govern human beings.   Emotional states persist in ways that resist control.   Distrust, friendship, enmity, and love cannot be removed by decree or maintained by thought.   Each requires ritual to provide continuity and containment.

Words alone cannot erase suspicion.    Distrust is one of the most persistent of these states. Suspicion cannot be erased by emotion.   Suspicion lingers and destabilizes interaction.   Ritual reduces its scope.   A greeting, an oath, or a contract are ceremonial acts repeated across encounters; they establish a minimum ground on which cooperation can occur.   These acts do not eliminate suspicion, but they allow engagement to proceed in spite of it.

Friendship depends on feelings, but feelings without form fade.   Ritual gives duration to friendship.    Shared meals, recurring visits, exchanges of favors, and so forth, are patterned acts that affirm a relation.   By themselves, they do not create friendship, but without them friendship weakens.   Rituals sustain that which cannot be commanded—the persistence of trust and attachment across time.

Enmity is no less powerful.    Unbounded hostility escalates until destruction follows.   Rituals channel hostility into limited form:    a duel, a contest, a formal debate—each provides a frame in which enmity can be expressed without collapse.   Even in war, treaties operate as ritual forms that restrict violence to recognizable limits.    Without them, conflict loses proportion.

Love in itself is unstable.   It begins in impulse and only lasts with repetition.   Daily gestures, renewed promises, anniversaries, and continuous acts of care provide a form to sustain it.    These rituals do not guarantee permanence, but they give a structure to love within which it can endure.    Without these rituals, love dissipates.

In all these states, ritual serves the same function.    It gives order where the force cannot be controlled directly.   It does not remove distrust, friendship, sexuality, enmity, or love.    It makes them livable.

V

Governance is the state where human forces are amplified by scale.    Distrust, enmity, and competing loyalties appear not only among individuals but among groups.    Ideological differences cannot be eliminated; they can be managed.   Ritual provides the procedure by which this is done.

One example is Parliamentary procedure.    Debate, order of speaking, and voting are repeated acts that permit conflict to be expressed without dissolution.    The forms themselves do not create agreement.   They provide limits within which disagreement can persist.

Civic ceremonies perform a related function.   Inaugurations, public oaths, and national commemorations do not change political conditions in of themselves.    Their repetition affirms the continuity of authority and gives recognition to transitions of power.   The acts are symbolic only in appearance; their real function is procedural stability.

Elections are more direct.   They do not remove ideological division.   They provide a repeated method for channeling conflict into outcomes recognizable by opposing sides.   Without elections, or when their results are not acknowledged, division tends toward rupture.

Ritual is necessity.    Governance depends on it.   Across species, ritual arises from the need to manage forces that exceed direct control.   Human conduct continues this principle.

In ancient Athens, the assembly and the use of the lot allowed opposition to be expressed without dissolving civic order.    Later, parliaments and councils provided ritual structures for negotiation between absolute monarchs and subjects.    In modern democracies, constitutions and electoral cycles maintain continuity by repeating forms that regulate the transfer of power.   When such rituals fail, the outcome is predictable.    Governance is a ritual that makes ideological differences livable.    Without ritual, politics reduces itself to domination and resistance, a cycle that cannot sustain order.

Annotated Bibliography

  • Arendt, Hannah: On Revolution. New York: Viking, 1963. (Arendt emphasizes the role of civic procedures in sustaining governance; this underlies Chapter V’s claim that ritual makes ideological difference livable.)
  • Douglas, Mary: Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge, 1966. (Douglas’s work on ritual boundaries informs Chapter IV’s discussion of distrust, enmity, and the management of instability through repeated acts.)
  • Durkheim, Émile: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press, 1995. (Durkheim argues that ritual is the foundation of social cohesion, an idea reflected in Chapter I’s claim that rituals regulate behavior and prevent destabilization.)
  • Freud, Sigmund: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books, 2000. (Freud’s psychoanalytic discussion of sexual drive and obsession parallels Chapter III’s treatment of private rituals and the containment of unresolved desire.)
  • Geertz, Clifford: The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973. (Geertz treats ritual as “models of” and “models for” reality; his ethnographic analysis supports the essay’s extension of ritual from sexuality to governance in Chapters IV and V.)
  • Habermas, Jürgen: Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996. (Habermas shows how ritualized procedures in discourse and law preserve governance under conflict; his thesis supports the essay’s treatment of parliamentary debate and elections.)
  • Jung, Carl Gustav: Symbols of Transformation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956. (Jung traces how instinctual drives, especially sexuality, become ritualized in both individual psychology and collective culture; his analysis complements Chapter III.)
  • Turner, Victor: The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine, 1969. (Turner’s analysis of liminality informs Chapter III and IV, where sexuality, friendship, and enmity are shown to require ritual frames to carry disruptive forces without collapse.)

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“The Colors of Certainty”

August 23, 2025

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Author’s Note:

This essay is the first part of a trilogy that explores how human beings approach reality through certainty, doubt, and ambivalence. It begins with certainty—how the desire for stability drives thought and belief, even when what appears secure is already open to change. Though written from personal inquiry, its scope is broader: the question of certainty concerns not one life but the fragile conditions of shared reality. The trilogy continues with The Discipline of Doubt and concludes with When All We Know Is Borrowed.

Ricardo Morín, Bala Cynwyd, Pa. August 23, 2025

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The Colors of Certainty

We live in an age unsettled by division. The subtleties of thought that once allowed us to pause, to weigh, and to distinguish are increasingly swept aside by the demand for immediate clarity. Everything is urged toward opposites: yes or no, ally or enemy, awake or asleep. The pace of public life, accelerated by technology and amplified by conflict, leaves little patience for nuance. Contradiction, which once signaled the restless work of an honest mind, is now treated as treachery. In this atmosphere, to admit complexity is to risk mistrust, and even the smallest hesitation is judged as weakness. We are asked, again and again, to define ourselves as though identity were a single stroke, not a layered drawing made across time.

Symbols flourish in such a climate while they reduce complexity into consumable images. Few have proven more enduring than the pill metaphors drawn from The Matrix film. When it appeared in 1999, the scene of choosing between a red pill and a blue pill was a cinematic device, which dramatized the tension between reality and illusion. Its influence grew gradually, as the film became a generational touchstone. Over the decades that followed, the pills slipped into online communities and political rhetoric only to harden into modes of thought that now shape how we imagine truth and the identity of belonging. To take the red pill became a declaration of awakening, access to hidden truths. To take the blue pill was to be mocked for complacency. Eventually the darker black pill emerged into both despair and fatalism embraced as destiny.

Once this logic takes hold, the world itself is reduced to a theater of absolutes. Disagreement becomes disloyalty, and belonging is measured not by shared life but by categorical allegiance. I have felt this even in conversations with people I have known for decades. In one such exchange, I remarked that I was appalled by Noam Chomsky’s recent habit, even in his nineties, of opposing Western hegemony over Russia as though that stance could excuse the war in Ukraine. Yet in another context, I expressed admiration for Chomsky’s earlier work on linguistic relevance in science four decades ago, which continues to illuminate how language shapes knowledge. To my interlocutor, these two statements seemed incompatible, as if they could not both be true. The expectation was that my judgment had to be seamless: either I rejected Chomsky entirely or endorsed him wholly.

Why must one justify such distinctions, as though every judgment were required to form a single line of allegiance? The contexts are not the same—one belongs to the 1980s, another to the present; one to the realm of linguistics, another to geopolitics. Yet in today’s climate, the demand for congruence is relentless. It reflects the pill logic that has seeped into our speech and habits of thought: one is either awake or asleep, aligned or opposed, consistent across every domain or untrustworthy in all.

That same craving for certainty also gave us Infowars—the radio podcast. Founded in 1999, the very year The Matrix was released, it became a commercial theater of the red pill metaphor. Infowars thrived on dramatizing crisis, telling its audience that elites, governments, or hidden forces manipulated events at every turn. What institutions explained as complexity, Infowars simplified into betrayal. The clarity it offered was intoxicating: good versus evil, freedom versus tyranny, awake versus deceived. It was not simply ideas being sold, but certainty itself—packaged with survival kits, supplements, and slogans. In seeking to liberate its audience from illusion, Infowars created a new one, offering not understanding but a permanent performance of awakening.

The narrowing of discourse is not only about politics and ideology, but it also extends to who is permitted to speak. I was reminded of this in a private exchange, where writing itself was dismissed as the work of an “armchair liberal” or a “limousine socialist.” According to this view, only those directly scarred by battle may speak of war, only those who have suffered prejudice firsthand may give voice to injustice, and to write as an observer is to mock the reality of struggle. It is a charge meant to discredit, as though the act of “fighting with a keyboard” were less real than hand combat in a bloodied field. Yet such suspicion denies what writing has always been: a means of bearing witness, of preserving memory, of shaping the conversation through which societies recognize themselves. The pen has never replaced experience, but it has always transformed it into something shareable and durable. To demand firsthand suffering as the sole qualification for speech is to reduce witness to autobiography and to strip dialogue of the breadth that comes when voices join from different vantage points.

Another difficulty lies in language itself. Writers who seek precision—who stretch language to its sharpest edge—often find that what emerges are metaphors. Even when grounded in substantiated terms, description requires figures of thought, images, and analogies that can never be wholly exact. The question is how precise language can ever be. Even the most brilliant minds struggle with definitions, because in their best formulations they remain presumptive theories. To acknowledge this is not to diminish language but to recognize that our dependence on tropes is not weakness but necessity. Story lines and metaphors are the bridges of comprehension, without which complexity would dissolve into noise. To lean on metaphor is not necessarily to abandon truth but to approach it by way of what can be shared.

What began as a film’s conceit has become a method of thinking, and in many ways a prison. The Matrix offered its audience a vision of awakening through choice, but our culture has taken that image and turned it into a grid of loyalties, where every stance is measured by whether one has swallowed the right capsule. Infowars amplified this posture; it dramatized the hunger for certainty until conspiracy became a substitute for thought. Suspicion of the writer’s position narrowed it further while it mocked reflection as inauthentic and demanded that speech bear the scars of direct experience before it could count as legitimate. And beneath it all lies the frailty of language itself: its inability to define with absolute precision, its reliance on metaphors that shape the very realities they describe.

To speak today of red pills, blue pills, or black pills is not only to reference a film or a subculture; it is to acknowledge the grip of a society that prefers binaries to dialogue, antagonism to complexity, performance to reflection. To resist that grip is to remember that thought is not a pill to be swallowed but a conversation to be carried, a conversation sustained in the fragile medium of language itself. However uncertain, however provisional, it is in that ongoing act of speaking and listening that culture remains alive—where friendship can endure, where witness can be honored, and where the truths no single color can contain still find their voice.

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About the cover image:

Newsprint Series Nº 9, 2006, by Ricardo Morín (47” × 74”): Translucent dyes, ink, white-out, and blotted oil paint on newsprint.

This image belongs to a series that transforms fragments of printed matter into layered fields of color and erasure, this piece speaks to the instability of certainty itself. The pigments veil and expose in turns, while the newsprint beneath reminds us that truth is mediated, provisional, and never free of interpretation. As with language in the essay, meaning emerges only through contrast, through what resists containment.

Annotated Bibliography

  • Cialdini, Robert B. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. New York: Harper Business, 2006. (A classic study in behavioral psychology showing how persuasion exploits binary choices and authority cues, useful for understanding the appeal of pill metaphors and the certainty promised by conspiracy movements.)
  • Lakoff, George, and Johnson, Mark: Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. (A foundational text on metaphor in cognition and language, relevant to the essay’s argument that even the most precise use of language depends on tropes and figurative structures for human comprehension.)
  • Marwick, Alice, and Lewis, Rebecca: Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online. New York: Data & Society Research Institute, 2017. (This analytical report documents how conspiracy narratives spread through online ecosystems; it highlights the role of platforms in amplifying symbolic binaries such as “red pill” awakening.)
  • Pew Research Center: “Public Trust in Government: 1958–2023”. Washington: Pew Research Center, 2023. (Presents longitudinal data on the decay of institutional trust in the United States and offers a data-driven context for why audiences turned to alternative voices such as Infowars.)
  • Southern Poverty Law Center: “Male Supremacy”. Montgomery: SPLC, 2019. (A report classifying the Incel subculture and related groups within the larger “male supremacist ecosystem,” cited in connection to the black pill ideology and its links to violence.)
  • Sunstein, Cass R., and Vermeule, Adrian: Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014. (This book explores why conspiracy theories flourish and frames them as efforts to create certainty in moments of social disorientation. It is highly relevant to the discussion of Infowars as a commercial theater of the red pill metaphor.)
  • Taguieff, Pierre-André: The New Culture Wars. Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2020. (This book is a political-philosophical treatment of identity politics and binary antagonisms in Western democracies: it offers a perspective on how pill metaphors entered the broader theater of culture wars.)
  • Tversky, Amos, and Kahneman, Daniel: Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. (A landmark in cognitive science explaining why people reduce complex realities into simplified binaries; it anchors the essay’s meditation on the lure of certainty.)

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“The Withering of Culture: Goodness and Civility”

July 24, 2025

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Ricardo Morin
“The Void of a Symbol”
CGI
2025

To all that suffer

By Ricardo Morin

July 2025

Abstract

This essay examines the ethical decline at the heart of contemporary civic life and its consequences for culture.   It argues that culture is not merely the preservation of artistic or intellectual forms, but the public expression of moral purpose.   Drawing from Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958)—in particular, her critique of the “worldlessness” of mass society—the essay traces how symbolic and institutional forms have become detached from ethical responsibility.   In place of a culture grounded in shared moral commitments, it identifies the rise of anticulture:   a spectacle-driven imitation of cultural life, stripped of civic responsibility and moral depth.   Rejecting nostalgia, the essay calls for a cultural renewal based on solidarity, public compassion, and ethical engagement.

The Withering of Culture: Goodness and Civility

Culture’s crisis is a moral one before it is a political one.

A society’s cultural life is not sustained by museums, literature, or festivals alone.   These may serve as symbols of identity or refinement, but culture, in its fullest sense, demands a deeper moral orientation.   If goodness—understood as a commitment to the dignity of others—does not animate civic life, culture loses its grounding and becomes a decorative shell.   It may preserve the language, symbols, and rituals of a healthy society, but without ethical vitality, these forms risk becoming performative—or even deceptive.   What withers first in such decline is not expression but conscience—the inner faculty that gives culture its ethical weight.

The current state of American public life illustrates this decline.   Public discourse has grown coarse.   It is now common for political actors to brand their opponents not merely as mistaken, but as dangerous or depraved.   During his first presidency—and again since returning to office—Donald Trump has labeled critics as “traitors,” “scum,” and “evil.”   At rallies and across social media, he has referred to political adversaries as “vermin,” language historically used by authoritarian regimes to delegitimize opposition.   The press has been repeatedly cast as “the enemy of the people,” a phrase long employed to undermine public accountability.

This style of politics has become normalized.   In school board meetings, legislative chambers, and campaign platforms, elected officials accuse their counterparts of being “groomers,” “communists,” or “un-American”—language that transforms disagreement into moral condemnation.   In 2023, when Republican Utah Governor Spencer Cox publicly supported protections for LGBTQ youth and called for civil dialogue, far-right commentators denounced him as a ‘Republican in name only’—a supposed traitor to conservative values.   His appeal to empathy was interpreted not as strength of character but as political surrender.   In such an environment, even measured gestures of respect are read as weakness—or worse, betrayal.

Conspiracy theories once relegated to fringe pamphlets now echo in congressional hearings.   Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has accused political opponents of orchestrating “Satanic rituals”, while Senator J.D. Vance suggested that cultural and academic elites pose an existential threat to the nation.   In such an environment, political opposition is recast as moral deviance.   The result is not merely polarization, but a systematic dismantling of the civic imagination.

What is promoted in this environment is not only a political ideology, but a form of power centered on the humiliation of others—a self-glorifying posture sustained by the denigration it requires.   This type of leadership rests not on principle or public vision but on the glorification of one’s own image. It is a form of narcissistic power—not in clinical terms, but as the conversion of symbolic authority into a vehicle for grievance, personality cult, and systematic contempt for difference.

The consequences of this climate are not confined to rhetoric.   In 2022, Paul Pelosi, the husband of then–Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, was attacked in their home by an intruder radicalized by online conspiracies.   In 2025, Minnesota state senator Melissa Hortman and her husband were murdered by a man reportedly enraged by progressive legislative agendas.   Around the same time, a lone assailant attacked attendees at a local Pride event, citing ideological grievances as justification.  More recently, on September 10, 2025, the high profile influencer Charlie Kirk was assassinated by a young radical inflamed by the very rhetoric he opposed.   These acts are not isolated tragedies.  They reveal a civic landscape in which anger is not only normalized but weaponized.  Dehumanizing discourse is not idle speech; it becomes license for violence.

Online platforms amplify these dynamics.  What began as tools for connection have become engines of outrage.  Algorithms on platforms like X (formerly Twitter) promote content that inflames rather than informs.   Verbal take-downs, personal attacks, and tribal affirmations generate more engagement than thoughtfulness or restraint.   The loudest voices—not the wisest—are the most amplified.  As a result, cruelty is often rewarded as candor, and ridicule is mistaken for insight.

The effects are tangible.   A mayor receives death threats for enforcing public health policies.   A schoolteacher is harassed online for adopting inclusive language.   A librarian resigns after refusing to censor materials that affirm pluralism.  Columbia University pays over $200 million in penalties to the federal government under political pressure from the Trump administration—forced to signal partisan compliance in order to continue its cancer research.  These are not anecdotal exceptions.   They reveal a broader decline of democratic sensibility:   a failure to recognize fellow citizens as worthy of care, dialogue, or even basic dignity.

Nowhere is this inversion of moral language more visible than in two of the most enduring national failures:   the absence of universal healthcare and the unchecked circulation of firearms.  In both, the language of freedom conceals the logic of profit.   Insurance and weapons industries, fortified by investors and political patrons, convert dependency and fear into revenue while legislators invoke “choice” and “rights” as moral cover for their complicity.  The result is a civic inversion:  health and safety—once understood as the moral responsibilities of a just society—are administered as markets.   When interest acquires the vocabulary of conscience, democracy begins to speak its own undoing.

Yet this crisis is frequently mischaracterized.   To name it is not to indulge in nostalgia.   The diagnosis does not propose a return to an idealized past, but instead demands a reckoning with the ethical foundations of culture itself.   A society may build monuments, publish literature, and preserve archives—but if it no longer cultivates compassion, humility, and the habit of care, its culture has already begun to wither.

When Aaron Copland composed Fanfare for the Common Man in 1942, the phrase “the common man” carried a sense of moral optimism—the embodiment of democratic dignity, sacrifice, and inclusion.  Today, detached from that wartime faith in shared purpose, the same title sounds almost ironic, as if questioning whether the “common man” still exists amid inequality, manipulated populism, and performative patriotism.  What was once an anthem of unity now lingers as an echo of the ideal—equality, justice, and shared responsibility—and that echo reveals, beneath its noble resonance, a critique of how those virtues have been hollowed out and repurposed by demagogic politics and consumer spectacle.  The fanfare no longer celebrates; it laments.  It stands as an elegy for the loss of democratic sincerity masquerading as triumph, capturing with quiet precision the tension between moral aspiration and civic disillusionment.

This moral decay gives rise to what may be called anticulture:   not the absence of cultural forms, but their inversion—their use as instruments of division, branding, or control.   Anticulture offers performance without substance, heritage without responsibility, and visibility without ethical vision.   It mimics meaning but does not generate it.  Its language flatters rather than guides.   Its stories entertain but do not bind.

When conviction forgets to breathe, it mistakes endurance for moral strength. In time, it becomes a ritual of loyalty to its own image. Aspiration, however, is the current that keeps conviction alive—the movement that returns it to conscience. Without conviction, aspiration drifts without form; without aspiration, conviction calcifies into creed. The moral imagination depends on their continual exchange: hope that remembers, and memory that still dares to imagine.

To rebuild culture is to recover its moral essence.   It is not enough to preserve institutions, sponsor festivals, or fund the arts if the ethical spirit is neglected.   Culture without goodness becomes hollow—easily co-opted by spectacle, tribalism, or power.  Acts of public courage, the rehumanization of discourse, and the refusal to normalize contempt are not ornamental gestures; they are essential conditions for renewal.  Like democracy, culture must be tended—not merely inherited or displayed.   When culture mistakes approval for virtue, morality becomes a mirror for power.   At its core, culture and goodness are not separate.   Nurturing one gives life to the other.   Where goodness falters, culture loses its vitality; where it is cultivated, culture may yet be renewed. The work of rehumanization is therefore never complete; it must remain a continual labor of conscience.

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Annotated Bibliography

Arendt, Hannah: The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. (Arendt explores the distinction between labor, work, and action, offering a foundational critique of how modern life has eroded meaningful public engagement).

Bellah, Robert N., et al: Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. (This sociological study examines the tensions between individualism and civic responsibility in American culture).

Berman, Marshall: All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982. (Berman traces the psychological and cultural disorientation caused by modernity, especially in urban life).

Girard, René: Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977. (Girard’s theory of mimetic desire and sacrificial violence clarifies how cultural forms can devolve into mechanisms of exclusion or aggression).

Lasch, Christopher: The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. New York: W. W. Norton, 1979. (Lasch critiques the rise of therapeutic individualism and the erosion of civic virtue).

MacIntyre, Alasdair: After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981. (MacIntyre’s argument that modern moral discourse is fragmented and incoherent lays the philosophical groundwork for the essay).

Nussbaum, Martha C.: Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013. (Nussbaum argues that cultivating emotional capacities—such as compassion and solidarity—is essential for a just society).

Putnam, Robert D.: Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. (Putnam presents a comprehensive study of declining civic engagement in the United States).

Sandel, Michael J.: What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. (Sandel critiques the intrusion of market logic into spheres of life traditionally governed by ethical norms).

Taylor, Charles: A Secular Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. (Taylor examines the moral and cultural consequences of secular modernity, particularly the fragmentation of shared meaning).

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“Lines That Divide: …

July 21, 2025

… Rethinking Identity and Belonging in Civic Life”

By Ricardo Morin

July 2025

Ricardo Morin
Silence III
22’ x 30” 
Watercolor, graphite, gesso, acrylic on paper 
2010

Abstract

This essay explores the moral and civic tensions between identity and democratic belonging. While the affirmation of cultural, ethnic, or political identity can offer dignity and solidarity, it can also harden into exclusionary boundaries. The essay argues that liberal democracies must find ways to acknowledge difference without allowing it to erode shared commitments to equal rights, mutual recognition, and the rule of law. Drawing on historical reflection and philosophical insight, it calls for a civic imagination that resists reductionism and makes space for the full complexity of human life.

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“Lines That Divide: Rethinking Identity and Belonging in Civic Life”

The idea of a people signifies more than shared humanity—it evokes a sense of belonging, shaped by culture, memory, and mutual recognition. At its best, it names the bonds that tie individuals to communities, traditions, and aspirations larger than themselves. Yet when the phrase my people becomes a marker of separation or proprietary ownership over culture, suffering, or truth, it risks reinforcing the very divisions that our civic and legal frameworks aim to overcome. What begins as a declaration of identity can easily become a posture of exclusion. We hear it in moments of pain, pride, or fear: “You wouldn’t understand—you’re not one of us.” Sometimes that is true. But when the language of belonging hardens into a refusal to listen or an excuse not to care, it stops being a refuge and becomes a wall.

Throughout history, group identities—whether national, racial, religious, or political—have served both as sources of solidarity and as instruments of division. While identity offers a means to reclaim dignity and assert visibility in the face of marginalization, it also contains the seeds of separation. The line between affirmation and alienation is perilously thin. The same identity that uplifts a community can harden into a boundary that isolates others. It is a double-edged sword: capable of healing or harming, depending on how it is wielded.

The modern democratic project rests on a delicate balance: it must recognize difference while upholding equality. Liberal democracies are premised on the idea that all individuals, regardless of group affiliation, possess equal rights under the law. It’s a principle taught in early childhood, often before it’s fully understood: the sense that rules should be fair, that being left out or judged before being known feels wrong. That early moral intuition is echoed in constitutional promises, which exist not just to reflect majorities but to protect the dignity of each person, especially when they are in the minority—of belief, background, or circumstance.

The goal is not to erase identity, but to prevent it from becoming the sole axis along which rights, value, or participation are measured. When identity becomes the primary currency of belonging, we risk turning citizenship into a competition of grievances, where recognition is awarded only at the expense of others.

This problem is not abstract. We see it daily in public discourse, where appeals to identity often overshadow appeals to principle. The phrase my people can be used to claim historical injury, moral superiority, or cultural authority—but it can also suggest exclusion, as if others are not part of that moral circle. The danger lies in what is left unsaid: who is not included in my people? Who becomes them?

Such binaries—us versus them—flatten the complexity of human relationships and obscure our mutual dependence. In truth, no community exists in isolation. Our economies, institutions, and ecosystems are inextricably linked. The law is designed to reflect that interdependence by granting rights universally, not tribally. Yet when identity becomes the filter through which justice is demanded or denied, the rule of law suffers. Justice ceases to be blind and becomes instead a servant of factional interests.

This does not mean we should abandon the language of identity. Cultural and historical specificity matter. Erasing them in the name of unity risks another form of injustice: the silencing of lived experiences. The solution is not to reject identity, but to contextualize it—to understand it as one part of a broader human condition, rather than the totality of a person’s worth or moral standing.

To move forward, we must ask a hard question: Can we acknowledge identity without allowing it to calcify into division? Can we affirm cultural or historical differences while building institutions and relationships that are capacious enough to include those unlike ourselves?

Doing so requires more than tolerance. It demands a civic imagination—one that envisions solidarity not as uniformity, but as the commitment to coexist with dignity across lines of difference. It means seeing others not primarily as representatives of a group, but as individuals with rights, needs, and aspirations equal to our own. It means remembering that no one can be fully known by a single trait, history, or belonging—not even ourselves. We each carry contradictions: tenderness alongside prejudice, loyalty tangled with resentment, the need to be seen and the fear of being exposed. To honor our shared humanity is to make space for that complexity—not to excuse harm, but to understand that moral life begins not with certainty, but with humility.

Ultimately, the challenge of our time is not merely to recognize difference, but to live with it constructively. The real test of a pluralistic society is not how loudly it proclaims diversity, but how equitably it distributes belonging. To succeed, we must shift from my people to our people—not as an erasure of identity, but as a deeper, shared commitment to the fragile experiment of coexistence.

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Annotated Bibliography

Appiah, Kwame Anthony: The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity. New York: Liveright, 2018. (Explores how identities such as race, creed, and nation are constructed, sustained, and misused—calling for a more flexible, cosmopolitan ethics.)

Arendt, Hannah: The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. (Analyzes the nature of political life and plurality, grounding civic belonging in the shared space of action and speech rather than fixed identities.)

Benhabib, Seyla: The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. (Defends universal human rights while acknowledging the legitimacy of cultural claims—proposing a model of democratic iterations.)

Fukuyama, Francis: Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018. (Traces the rise of identity politics globally and its impact on democratic institutions, arguing for a re-centering of shared civic values.)

Glazer, Nathan, and Daniel P. Moynihan: Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians and Irish of New York City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1963. (Classic sociological study showing how ethnic identities persist across generations and shape urban belonging in complex, often contradictory ways.)

Hooks, Bell: Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press, 1990. (Critiques exclusionary forms of identity politics and calls for forms of solidarity that cross boundaries of race, gender, and class.)

Ignatieff, Michael: Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994. (Personal and political reflections on nationalism in the post–Cold War era, warning of the moral danger in defining belonging through ancestry.)

Rawls, John: Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. (Presents a theory of justice grounded in overlapping consensus rather than shared identity, advocating for stability in a pluralist society.)

Taylor, Charles: Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Edited by Amy Gutmann. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. (Argues that recognition of cultural identity is vital to individual dignity, but must be balanced within a just liberal framework.)

Wiesel, Elie: Nobel Peace Prize Lecture. Oslo: Nobel Foundation, 1986. (A deeply moral reflection on human solidarity, memory, and the responsibility to resist indifference—invoking identity without exclusion.)

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