iron rings
university
The obligation to participate, to recite the ritual wording and Victorian phrasing, and to modulate the ethos of the collective: these add up to a pantomime, cannier than those usually staged at the expense of the audience. It can be all the more breathless for its stripped essence: the religiosity, the accidentals of ritual cadence and iconography, commonly attributed to venerable, “time-hallowed” origins, have been excised. The Iron Ring ceremony that I attended at McMaster (as a part of my final year in university) constitutes an occasion for interrogating the residues of significance lodged in what remains.
I, ****Aaron Pham****, in the presence of these my betters and my equals in my Calling, bind myself upon my Honour and Cold Iron, that, to the best of my knowledge and power, I will not henceforward suffer or pass, or be privy to the passing of, Bad Workmanship or Faulty Material in aught that concerns my works before mankind as an Engineer, or in my dealings with my own Soul before my Maker. My time I will not refuse; my Thought I will not grudge; my Care I will not deny towards the honour, use, stability and perfection of any works to which I may be called to set my hand.
Kipling’s archaisms (henceforward, aught) give the document a 17th-century weight it does not actually have, since the thing was composed by a Victorian in 1923. This is his original text; the version read to us in 2026 had been through the Wardens’ recent sanding, mentors and peers where Kipling wrote betters and equals, a pledge where he wrote a binding, the Soul and its Maker retired for conscience.
One is the sacramental logic of the ring: an ex opere operato, purely mechanical, utterly amoral efficacy for good. The medieval arrangement was explicit on the point: a sacrament works regardless of the virtue of the man administering it, Aquinas’ little ethics problem. The ring inherits the loophole wholesale. It works on its wearer whether the wearer is particularly awful or merely indifferent or, sweet heaven, particularly good. Haultain asked Kipling for the wording in 1923, and Kipling, who had already given cold iron a mythology of its own in verse, obliged with a text that binds upon Honour and Cold Iron and asks nothing about the moral state of either; how much of that core the recent revisions have touched is an open question.
That part at least of the enterprise is ironical, a historical curiosity blessed with a certain ingenuous grace. Recall Haultain’s lopsided vision of a tribal bond for the profession, floated at an Engineering Institute dinner in 1922; the Mohawk ironworkers from Kahnawake who walked the high steel over the St. Lawrence; the shuddering apologies and chastened imaginings of engineers when, on 29 August 1907, the Quebec Bridge simply fell down, collapsing spectacularly, killing 75 of the 86 men on the span, 33 of them from Kahnawake, for reasons a royal commission would trace to the designers’ arithmetic: this is the historical mythic stock-in-trade of the business, a foundational tragedy co-opted into ritual; and the urban legend that rings are hewn from the wreckage, though contradicted at the simple level of material resources (stainless steel doesn’t grow on rusting beams) plays a vital role in keeping the shared delusion alive.
And there’s the phenomenology of a ring actually being worn. After four months of immediately preceding rituals, the thing itself is nothing to write home about: this is not a ring that makes a remarkable impression, either on the hand it adorns, or through the purely neural vectors available to it. The distinctively obtrusive click of it against a desk is a sound that disappears after four months of wear. To me, it is nothing more than another piece of jewelry, and there will be many more simply glittering objects to come. The half-amused little tap of the ring against the palm of the outstretched hand is just another doodle on another napkin.
This is not, of course, the effect the scheme is intended to have. The ring is understood in principle as a behavioural nudge towards a more self-conscious ethical stance, a piece of training in what Wittgenstein would call a technique: the reflective habit of taking responsibility for their actions’ general consequences. The reason it doesn’t do this very well, however, is that moral language turns out not to have the fixing properties theory notoriously supposed.
Moral utterances are in themselves expressions of attitude, and not susceptible to being summed up in expressions of simpler kinds either as states of fact or as standard of value. This is what Ayer and Stevenson among others were trying to show, and it has tended to make both emotivist exegesis and its many, many philosophical refutations seem strangely sterile in practice. In this context, however, it is precisely the practical impotence of the iron ring’s threat of consequence that makes it precisely the kind of attempted surrogate for a sense of moral obligation where that sense is not already there: it’s a joke.
It’s a joke on behavioural nudging of a certain kind where using old-style religious language, sacrificing sheer incompetence to the useful reignition of the auto-suggestive effects of automatic rituals.
Which is not to say the ring doesn’t have effects. What it really does is to create a feeling of collective effervescence, that peculiar Durkheimian high described by those who’ve lived it: a sudden warm sense of tribal belonging as the time goes by, murmured sentiments, punctilious recitations, the almost sacred performance of communal grammatical forms. Particularly when the trivialized words with which it commences are followed by the Obligation’s punchy line, it produces the happy feeling of belonging to something bigger than oneself. The ethical core of what’s being achieved is not in the stuff of the recitations themselves but in the shared feeling they produce, the feeling of belonging to a community, which usually stands for something bigger as well. In the language game of the engineering profession, the ethical sense relies on blik, Hare’s name for that definite though unfounded sense of how things really are.
We don’t mention this, obviously. The ring is a private thing, a secret shared between the two without a third, an intimate bond in and through the ostensible unworthiness that it supposedly symbolizes. What it isn’t, however, is what it’s necessary to become: a student. I am aware now, past the midpoint in the first post-graduate summer, that after five years, the word student has begun to fall away from me as the default position from which to run meaning off my actions in public life. It’s one thing to drop the title ‘student’; it’s something else that the coherent, purely arbitrary complex of roles that goes with it, the suites of other people in similar sets of clothes, the tiny rituals and screams and class distinctions that make all the difference to how we live, should be quietly dissolved when the course actually ends. It’s odd to miss Exam Week now, even in memory. One supposes it has to be, or we would be in conversation with the ghost of the Aristotelian friend on a daily basis. Indeed, it is odd to recognize that what one supposed was merely accident of benign neglect, that one’s convivial relationships with fellow students in university were primarily sustained by shared obligations, and that those obligations served with delicate economy as the fragile scaffold of a communal life.
But this feeling of oddness is nothing compared to that of my luggage on the GO train to Hamilton the morning of the ceremony itself. Convocation is a way to keep one’s company after graduation, but it also serves as a ready-made narrative symbolisation, a figuration of closure. It has no bearing on reality, however, and as I ride through the shuttering of the trees and fields and the gleam of the glittering lakes and rivers, the ring still catches the little bit of shower water collecting in my right hand, and still bends the laws of elementary physics at my little finger. Camus’ absurd hero clowns for the audience at the edge of the cliff, and the whole show of his revolt is that he never steps off. The iron ring hangs cryptically behind him, capturing the rain that oozes from his slicked-back hair, though he never notices it.
Strictly speaking, both of them are senseless; but the ring is more uncompromisingly absurd. It is meaningless, but it’s also meaningless to talk about it, and the ceremony is strictly limited to a kind of talking with the ring, an elaborate game where the ring becomes a prime-place of some kind for the academic overidentification with the hardships of engineering work that it is meant to symbolize.
It cannot be said to mean anything at all in itself. That is to say, when we speak of the iron ring and its obligations, we don’t take those obligations to mean anything in themselves, nor do they speak to objective moral facts. Instead of working on this supposition, the ceremony explicitly inverts it, attempting to generate meaning in the here-and-now practices of the institution through commitment to a rule-governed form of life. According to Wittgenstein, such rule-based games are the only means of making sense of language, and the iron ring ceremony, like the many other ceremonies and term papers and recitations that sustained us through our years of university life, is just this: a kind of language game. In Wittgenstein’s words:
If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do.’
—Wittgenstein, PI §217
This seems a reasonable way to describe graduation. University education is nothing if not an immersion in many and varied language games–engineering, for one thing, but also ethics, and aesthetics, and social rituals of all sorts–each of which has its particular rules governing how we speak and act among others. The point is that we learn to speak and act according to these rules, not that we ever succeed in justifying them. To speak of them as ‘justifications’ would be, in Ryle’s idiom, an attempt at futility, a category mistake: a means of describing an allegedly self-justifying intelligibility within language that cannot be thought without already being practised.
The Iron Ring ceremony itself is such a language game, the word ‘obligation’ given particular meaning solely through being spoken within a shared practice that keeps its own rules. However, its significance is not limited to language, and there is a natural impulse to treat the ceremony, in practice as well as theory, as a kind of attempt to extend the language game into the realm of action. This might be said to be the purpose of the ring, to act within and as a reminder of an obligation to look after the health, safety and welfare of the public that is ostensibly at the heart of engineering practice. Naturally, however, one suspects that some degree of instrumental rationalism pervades here: an obligation of this sort is not one that we may take up out of hand, nor is it likely to emerge on its own initiative from the other obligations we already carry out in the practical tasks of life. According to such rationalism, for such an obligation to exert significant weight, there must be a ground to it in value – and presumably also in the rules of professional code, though the ceremony makes no effort to speak of, much less justify, any such rules. This would seem to be a perfectly reasonable line of thinking on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the embodiment of a mistake Wittgenstein once cautioned against:
It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words.
—Wittegenstein, Tractatus §6.421
That is, such propositions cannot be stated in any way that makes them the subject of a language game in which one defends, argues, questions or even forgets them. So, the fact that I lost sight of the ring on my hand for a month cannot be judged to have sustained or undermined my sense of obligation. On the contrary, a thought that now strikes me is that–much to my surprise, much to my own inexplicable relief–my loss of sight of the ring for a month may have actually served something better than a symbolic reminder; what seems to have endured more significantly is a quiet feeling that something is wrong about not seeing it, a connection not only with the notion of an obligation I must not forget but with some notion or feeling of a tribe and its associated beliefs, practices and structures of meaning–an entitative form of life–that originally made the notion of obligation intelligible to me in the first place.
And here perhaps is where I begin to see the point in Wittgenstein’s quietism and his image of the philosopher’s task as showing the fly the way out of the fly-bottle. It is certainly true that there are many very good reasons for trying to clarify one’s moral understanding, and excellent reasons for doing so with the assistance of others. But it is also true that certain philosophical efforts seem to be doomed from the start by a fundamental misconception of the question they intend to address. One such is to misunderstand the nature of moral awareness itself–supposing it to work on the same lines as theoretical understanding, as something one can solidify or describe through careful reasoning. A more promising approach is to remain patient with such concerns, and rather than dissipate one’s energies battling with them directly, to take a lesson from the ring: if what concerns you most is not to jettison the beliefs you hold but to learn something about what is most important in having them, then the ideas you try to hold on to may be the very means by which you feel most alone.
Thus I hold my ring out in front of me. It is not quite clean, because I haven’t had much time to clean it; and it is not quite what I thought I would be holding in my hand when I finally looked back at myself and my life to this point again, but then again it is. As we all know, in the final reckoning there is no grand synthesis of theory and practice, or of philosophy and life, in any single edifice of language or anything else. What, we keep hoping to find, remains is a truth – a cracked mirror of the highest promise of what we find most important in the university, a promise we left there long ago but seem always to be returning to. The Iron Ring ceremony enacted a truth in many ways, and a truth that only a few central to the work of scholarly learning will ever get around to examining: being an engineer is not only to be a practicing technologist, but also to be a practitioner of virtue. However, the general observation of the activity of virtue, and of the moral standards the practice of those virtues is thought to presuppose, does not amount to an explanation of how they may be practiced, let alone an ideology of moral progress that attests it. The other observation I made when I finally looked back at myself was that, in truth, it is never enough for such a thing to be the object of my ideals. The remains of the truth I am held to – my ring – is all that remains of what one must make of one’s ideals.