The architect of post-war Japan, Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida(1946-1947, 1948-1954) was a Christian. Suprisingly, the current Prime Minister, Shigeru Ishiba(no relation to Yoshida) is also a Christian. Even more suprisingly, 9 out 65 Japanese Prime Ministers have been Christian.
Also, the current Emperor's mother is from a Christian background(had to convert to Shintoism when she married the Emperor). I think its fair to say that while few Japanese are Christians, they are disproportionately represented amongst the Japanese elite.
With regards to Taiwan, Chiang-Kai shek converted to Christianity later in life. Sun-Yat Sen was also a Christian. Though I think its fair to say that Christianity does not have as much influence among Taiwanese elite compared to the Japanese elite.
Looking at the other Asian Tigers, the current leaders of South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore are all Christians, and they have had many Christian leaders in the past as well.
While obviously nowhere as influential as the West, I think its fair to say Christians are disproportionately representated amongst the elites of Asian Tigers. But how much we can attribute the economic success of these countries to the religious beliefs of their leaders is up for debate.
Hong Kong's Christian leaders are exactly the people spearheading its descent into a fascist dystopia, so I think that proves the opposite point very, very well.
Communism, Fascism, Liberalism, all emerged from a Christian millieu in Western Europe within a few decades of each other. They are all denominations of godless Christianity ;)
Yes, according to Wikipedia. This was in the 50s. The Imperial Family was also a religious role and was considered to semi-divine. Sure, the Americans abolished that concept after the war, but I am sure the traditionalists didn't suddenly just change their minds because MacArthur told them so. The Shintos also violently persecuted the Buddhists for being a foreign religion in the early Meiji period. While Shintoism is definitely less exclusivists in one sense(multiple gods), it can also be quite nationalistic, so less exclusive in that regards.
There was a Meiji decree enforcing separation between Buddhism and Shinto. The reason for the decree was that no real distinction was observed before then. Syncretism is the East Asian Way.
But the outcome of that decree is that today, instead of Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines being one and the same building, the Shinto shrine is an outbuilding just outside the Buddhist temple. They still aren't separate enough that putting one inside the other's temple grounds is a problem.
(Wikipedia:
"However, the process of separation stalled by 1873, the government's intervention in support of the order was relaxed, and even today the separation is still only partially complete: many major Buddhist temples retain small shrines dedicated to tutelary Shinto kami, and some Buddhist figures, such as the Bodhisattva Kannon, are revered in Shinto shrines."
> The Imperial Family was also a religious role and was considered to semi-divine.
None of that is incompatible with some of the family being Christian, as long as they also avow Shinto. The Pope might object to that - it's not good Christianity from a Western perspective. But why would the Japanese care?
The Japanese constitution is very intentionally based on Western governments, both the original 1890 version and the post WW2 revisions. It's as much a relic of Western christian society influence as any Western constitution is. I'm not as familiar with other asian countries but I imagine it would be similar? Constitutions as a concept didn't come into vogue without Western influence.
I think there are beautiful and dutiful ways of basing new things on ancient things. But we get stuck in traditions that at the time made sense and were fitting but we’re dancing to a different part of the music now and we have to learn the next part.
The “Canticle for Leibowitz” author went from ending his book with space Catholicism to being an atheist by the sequel, though perhaps the real thing will be more stable.
I might do a response piece to this but there’s no such thing as a “stable” institution, only institutions that are reliably reborn and able to adapt. Kinda like ol’ JC himself. There’s no future that won’t require our courage. Nor would I want that future.
An excellent point, one I wish people more deeply understood. Life span of an institution is like the life span of a cell: too short, something was broken; too long, it is probably cancerous. It needs to live long enough to serve its purpose, then die off when it is completed or the cell is no longer functioning well.
Capitalism's one great virtue is a standardized mechanism for killing off no-longer-functional institutions, while permitting the people who participated in them to mostly survive and go on to contribute elsewhere.
That doesn't work with religion, well at least the sort than have omniscient beings that express their preferences. If you start with the premise from the believer that their religion is as true as gravity or air, it doesn't and shouldn't change as it's infallible. Adaptation implies fallibility and a fallible religion isn't worth following in the face of competition even if you are a true believer hence the ease at which polytheistic fallible religion are supplanted. There is a reason monotheism came to dominate the world with the only hold outs really being agnosticism masquerading as religion such as Buddhism or Hinduism.
Empirically, infallibility isn't the only thing that attracts believers to religions. "True enough" is often sufficient. There will always be aspects that you're not allowed to doubt, but most religions keep that stuff out of the way of managing daily life. Not all of them (the few that have eternities meddling in everyday affairs could justly be called the "totalitarian" subtype) but most do explicitly leave room for change, emphasize that the universe is mysterious in some ways i.e. leave some parts of the map empty.
I think that is all perfectly natural and suspect that only someone memetically poisoned by the totalitarian subtype would think the gentler types are "agnosticism masquerading as religion".
See my response a couple down; I would expand upon it here but the gist is mostly the same so I won't. The only thing I would add is nothing attracts anyone to any religion once a person is religious as by definition there can only be one true religion hence given the supposition of true belief, attraction is irrelevant. Either you lose faith in your religion (which isn't possible in monotheism unless you become atheist / apostacy), get convinced a variant of it is better (i.e. heresy/apostacy), or (if you are polytheistic) decide the new god is better and you move to them (which is normal as polytheism is generally one of God_shopping_of_the_week) but then have to live under their new (monotheistic) rules because that is what the new super god requires if you want his support. Polytheistic religions are for all sakes and purposes "I can believe/do whatever I want because ultimately it doesn't matter because over infinite cycles I will always win", i.e. agnosticism dressed up with rituals and incense.
I’m not sure I believe this but can remember when I believed something close to this. Circumstances change. The same principles apply but their application looks different.
WTF Hinduism is not "agnosticism". There are monotheistic and polytheistic Hindus, but most of them are certainly not "agnostic". Either polytheism or ditheism make a lot more sense (to me, anyway) than monotheism does, and I have no more problem accepting a fallible religion than I have accepting the scientific method (which is also, obviously, fallible). Omniscience doesn't really make any sense either since it conflicts with free will.
Monotheism dominates the world because Western Europeans and Arabs/Turks were good at killing people and conquering territory, that's about it. Not because it makes more ideological or theological sense.
Of course they are agnostic in a real sense as the gods are irrelevant outside the immediacy of your cycle, i.e. they have no impact over eternity as eventually everyone reaches Nirvana or Buddhist annihilation. There is no path that doesn't result in you ultimately succeeding in the reincarnation or enlightenment endgame over infinite cycles. Some just reach it sooner than others hence the gods are literally irrelevant outside your current cycle, they can't prevent you from reaching the end state hence what you truly have is agnosticism, i.e. "I believe in the gods like I believe in my boss at work, they can make my life in the now better or worse and I can selective choose between them via the flavor of the week because ultimately it doesn't matter, I can live my life however I want because over eternity some future cycle self will get it right"
As for the last paragraph, not at all. The world was being dominated by polytheist people long before Christianity and Islam came to dominate the modern world so you have to ask yourself why it is those conquered people were so quick to convert rather than just die like Christians and Muslims for their god. The answer is because in a polytheistic world when Abrahamic God (hereafter God) shows up he is accepted as legitimate "just another god to add to the pantheon" but when you pray to Odin (Shiva, Huitzilopochtli , the flying spaghetti monster, the Emperor, whoever) time and time again while your enemy prays to God but he (Odin or your former big man on the block) keeps failing to deliver as you lose on the battlefield time and time again, you simply start praying to the new god (God) who actually can deliver as is apparent to all your dead friends because why stick with an obvious inferior and weak god who is nothing but a failure in the face of the new god on the block. And that new god is jealous so you have to give up on the god_of_the_week(tm) and so you forget your old ways and your kids become true believers. But that's OK because God delivers over his prima farcie inferior peers hence why you were conquered. Once again, the supposition is true belief, not science, hence the only that matters to the outcome of the battle is whose god is more powerful hence worthy of worship if you are polytheistic.
First time I read *Dune*, I got the impression Zensunni and the O.C. Bible were the products of thousands of years of institutional evolution. They fit right in thematically. Arrakis shaped the Fremen, the Bene Gesserit shaped their Kwisatz Haderach, so galactic politics had to shape religion, right?
Second time, I happened to see their description in the glossary. It turns out an ecumenical council did it in one stroke. I was so disappointed.
No, not at all. Zensunni developed over thousands of years. The OC Bible was the end result of a council after the Butlerian Jihad, which was galactic politics.
The anti-AI faction prevailed in the Butlerian Jihad, making a new faith necessary for reasons similar to the "Cultural Christian" argument. They needed something universal to provide meaning that would prevent anything that could lead to AI.
So they created the OC Bible with its main commandment of "Thou shalt not create a machine in the likeness of the human mind," truly wise words we should all live by.
He was much more interested in mashing names of incompatible religions together than actually trying to parse out any doctrine.
There was the Orange Catholic Bible yes, but the Fremen apparently followed "Zensunni", which is also a mashup.
Unsurprising since his characters were not particularly devout in anything other than following a messiah, i.e. all devout characters were members of a cult of personality.
“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been two hundred eighty five years since my last confession.”
And with these words, the dark figure sank to his knees onto the sub-zero lunar surface.
Reyes was happy that a mask was blocking his expression. This was the last thing he would have expected. Slowly he stood and slowly made the sign of the cross in above the hooded head of the kneeling figure. “In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Speak and ease your burden. Of what sins do you accuse yourself, my son?”
“Monstrous sins, both done, and sins I have in contemplation.”
“Sins not yet committed cannot be absolved. List your past sins that you repent. To repent means to turn away from them, and to avoid the occasions where they may tempt you again.”
“I have murdered all the Hermeticists, and spared only you five, of whom I have need.”
Reyes was aware of the wild feeling of supremacy, as if he had passed a test all his fellows had flunked; but he was also ashamed of this feeling. “Murder? They were victims of augmentation accidents. Unexpected divarifications, logic loops, Turing halt states … You need not to confess mere feelings of guilt where no real guilt obtains, my son.”
“It is a sin of omission. I ran the specifications to see what would be needed for a human brain to be correctly carried both into emulation, as with Exarchel, and into augmentation, as with me. I was able to reverse-engineer some steps of Rania’s work, and make guesses about others. And I knew they would fail. I knew they were weak. I could have stopped them with a command; I could have interfered with their experiments; I could have merely showed them my results of my trial runs I ran on your ghosts which my Exarchel has consumed. I know the secret. Or part of it.”
…“Ah! But you are wondering whether, as more and more people create upload copies of themselves, immortal upload copies, how soon it will be before the whole world is devoted to one electronic nirvana, a paradise of unreality? How can the Darwinian process continue unless the useless eaters of bread and the useless consumers of power die back? This involves my second horde of sins, the one I have not yet committed.”
Reyes was so elated hearing that he was to achieve posthuman greatness, that he almost did not hear what Del Azarchel was saying.
Reyes sobered. “My son! If you yet intend to do these sins, then you have no firm purpose of amendment, and have not repented of them.”
“I repent that they are necessary.”
…“The sins I contemplate and have committed is murder by the thousands and tens of thousand, murder by the millions, that the base stock of humanity be culled. The Hylics must die, of course. It would not be right to have allowed the Hermeticists to be decimated, without forcing the common people to suffer the same risks, and die at the same ratios. I mean to destroy nine parts of mankind in order that one tenth might survive and prosper, and become the seed of posthumanity. Without this, the Hyades will overwhelm Earth in the One Hundred and Tenth Century.”
Reyes y Pastor felt a disquieting sensation, like sickness in himself. “You are speaking of the cusp nexus occurring at the next crisis interval in our calculations? The calculation you showed us cast the genocide in terms of a hypothetical, assuming a continuing energy crisis against demographic shifts…”
“Ah. I also wish to confess the sins of bearing false witness. I have systematically falsified data fed to the Hermetic Order. The cliometric calculations show that cusp to be inevitable.”
Father Reyes wanted to wipe the cold sweat from his face, but this, of course, is one of the things one cannot do in a vacuum mask. “It is not inevitable if you repent of it.”
“It is inevitable because I have decreed it so. Once the rod-logic diamonds in all the cities of Earth have achieved a certain critical mass, I intend to coat the biosphere with Aurum Vitae, and reduce any organisms not needed in the neural net to more useful elements. Montrose’s only possible countermove is something he would not dare to do, since to destroy the computer mainframes of an entire world—by a decade from now, it will be world utterly dependent on emulation technology for both government and economic control functions—would be to trigger global collapse, leading to the same outcome.”
…The small part of his mind reminded him of the duties of his office. Reluctantly, he said, “It is an abuse of this sacrament to pretend to confess a crime not yet committed, nor can it be absolved. While within the seal of the confessional, you stand to me in the relation of son to father, because I speak with the voice of the Father and in His place while I act within His will—It is within my power to charge you and compel you not to do this act. By mortal sin a man excommunicates himself from Church, and from hope of salvation! Look in your conscience. You know what you intend is evil, an enormity beyond reckoning! Swear not to carry through with this! Swear upon your hope of heaven!”
Del Azarchel stood. “I have no need of heaven to house my soul, if I achieve physical immortality through the posthumanification process. I shall endure in one form or another for as long as this universe. Such a thing is not beyond my grasp…”
…But he also had his pride as an intellectual, as an academic, as a Hermeticist.
The common muck of mankind deserved death—was that not the general doom decreed for all Adam’s children? How would an act of genocide to decimate all the lands of Earth be so different from the Great Flood of Noah? It was practically the same as doing the work of the Lord, merely by other, and more efficient means.
And a loving God would not expect a man, especially a man of such superior intelligence as Reyes y Pastor, not to do anything necessary, commit any crime, forsake any oath, to preserve the human race in its new and inhuman form that Darwin demanded, so as to oppose the descent of the Hyades? Of course not. The Father knew all, and forgave all.
…“But of course—” his voice was hoarse, his mouth unexpectedly dry, “You also have the duty imposed by history to save mankind. Darwin makes certain demands upon us, and it is entirely within keeping with, ah, with common sense, that a man must do what is needed to preserve the race. Even if that means changing the race to something unthinkable.”
Del Azarchel moved one leg, so that he was upon one knee, not both, as if he were about to rise up. “What is this? You are a man of the cloth. It is your business to talk me out of this. Tell me of the hellfire.”
Reyes y Pastor begged in his heart to his heart for forgiveness, but with his lips he said, “The talk of hell in the Holy Scripture is meant to be metaphorical. All the enlightened and progressive thinkers agree. It is literary device to represent the burning flames of the conscience. Of course, as a being superior to human beings, your conscience should be evolved to the level beyond good and evil, as befits you.”
“Odd that you would say so. The more intelligent the augmentation makes me, the more logical and inevitable venerable ideas like hellfire seem. Almost as grim and inevitable as a cliometric calculation.”
“A loving God could not create a hell.”
“A loving God must have some place to put those exiles who reject His love, souls to whom the fires of that love are pain, because they hate it. Will you betray your own office, your oath of priesthood, everything, to counsel me to commit this deed? I was expecting the opposite from you.”
Reyes y Pastor turned up his oxygen gain and drew a deep breath. “My son, despite all your intelligence, your heart is clouded. Listen to me. Do you know how Benaiah the son of Jehoiada served King Solomon, wisest of the wise? He fell upon Joab while Joab was clinging to the horn of the altar, begging for mercy and demanding sanctuary. All this was done at the King’s commandment. And are you not wiser, in your augmented state, than Solomon ever was?”
Del Azarchel said softly, “It is the memory of Captain Ranier Grimaldi that haunts you. We mutinied and murdered him, in order to use his body for the raw materials to make Rania, and find a way to come home again. Your hands are bloodied as well as mine. How can bloodstained hands touch the Eucharist, or lave me in the water that absolves of sin?”
Reyes said blandly, “The doctrine of ex opere operato as first explicated by St. Augustine during the Donatist heresy makes clear that the individual impurities of the Episcopal officer do not impede the power of the sacrament coming through the office. Christ can absolve sins through me, polluted as I am. There is but one question here.”
“Ask it.”
“The genocide of man you have decreed, the mass extinctions—”
“Yes?”
“Does victory rest on the other side of them?”
Del Azarchel said, “Then you will absolve me of the evil I do if good comes of it?”
“No, my son. The sacrament of confession cannot be used in this way. As a priest and ghostly father I can do nothing for you. But I am also an Hermeticist, one of the rare to survive the expedition to the Diamond Star, and one of the even more rare to have survived the baptism of fire you ignited. And I say that Darwin will absolve you, for the process of evolution is the process that, through evils produces good, and through death, life. Rise up from this cold and lifeless dust! The penance I impose upon you is that you shall succeed in being the savior of mankind, and save the race from the Hyades. You shall not fail! Nor shall we fail you. You are right to demand we call you master, for we have no hope of salvation outside you.”
I would define space catholicism as the views intellectual catholics would hold 2000 years from now. How does the content of Christianity change as the context from which Christianity was born becomes more distant? That is, the answer to this question: what religious claims still make sense when removed from their original context and how do they develop so as to continue transmission? That's one thing that makes Unsong a great book, besides the puns. Unsong develops answers to ancient metaphysical questions in a modern context, and does so within a synthesis of traditions new and old.
One sideline of this is what Catholicism looks like when the Pope is 30 light years away and the only interaction is occasional Papal Bulls being sent at lightspeed, and maybe occasional doctrinal questions being sent toward the Vatican. The Church has lived in a world where the Vatican was very far away and communications and orders were very expensive and slow, so probably it could adapt.
Space Catholicism is just normal Catholicism. Plenty of Catholics in the aerospace industry. We don't need new religions. We need to understand that Christianity isn't a religion that's stuck in the past. It has always been about getting back to the future.
While the Imperial Cult [1] of Warhammer 40k is likely incompatible with Catholicism on the finer points, it nevertheless shares some similarity with medieval or early modern Catholicism:
* Strong endorsement of a feudal society structure
* Centrally controlled doctrine
* Belief in a god who walked among men
* Little tolerance approach to heterodox thought
* The common folks are not required to study theology in detail (contrast with Judaism)
* Aesthetic similarities (but with more skulls)
Of course, all of these features are shared with orthodox Christianity, and probably a lot of religious branches beside that.
Seeing Christian conservatives use Warhammer imagery has always been kind of amusing in the way that the God-Emperor is very close to being a literal Antichrist figure.
"[We] believe in no afterlife, no God. We see the universe as it is, Father Damien, and these naked truths are cruel ones. We who believe in life, and treasure it, will die. Afterward there will be nothing, eternal emptiness, blackness, nonexistence. In our living there has been no purpose, no poetry, no meaning. Nor do our deaths possess these qualities. When we are gone, the universe will not long remember us, and shortly it will be as if we had never lived at all. Our worlds and our universe will not long outlive us. Ultimately, entropy will consume all, and our puny efforts cannot stay that awful end. It will be gone. It has never been. It has never mattered. The universe itself is doomed, transient, uncaring.”
Basically the same, though while the post mentioned Ayaan specifically, and she has been explicit about her reasons, Dawkins and Richard Spencer have said similar things, and their reasons are slightly less obvious.
Arguably, it didn't do as well as it could have. According to a somewhat dubious source I didn't independently verify, the USSR was preparing for a massive war, had the strongest army in the world with lots and lots of quite modern (if not always top-notch) aircraft and tanks, and produced 5 times more oil than Germany ever had access to. And then it all collapsed faster and harder than France, and the only thing that saved Stalin's ass was that the USSR was somewhat bigger than France and he had time to try a few more things. (Including going easier on religion for a while, by the way.) The somewhat dubious source claims that most people simply didn't feel like fighting for the regime. Although there were enough reasons to hate it besides atheism, so no idea how much of the low morale (if the claim is correct) can be explained by it.
The homeland regime was genocidal too, while the genocide by the Germans was mostly against the Jews whose support among the rest of the Soviet people was ambiguous at best (Ukrainians had carried out their own Jewish genocide a generation ago).
Soviet Communism did fine because it had most of the emotional trappings of religion: it had its holy doctrine, saints, prophets, rituals and codified definitions of sins. It passed the point of a cult of personality and became just a cult of a mythologized Batyushka Stalin, the Man of Steel.
It worked a bit like that in every Socialst Republic. I remember my own Babcia reverently hanging the picture of the First Chairman Of the Party right next to a Crucifix, not entirely decided which Messiah to follow and hedging her spiritual bets.
"That legacy consists of an elaborate set of ideas and institutions designed to safeguard human life, freedom and dignity — from the nation state and the rule of law to the institutions of science, health and learning. As Tom Holland has shown in his marvellous book Dominion, all sorts of apparently secular freedoms — of the market, of conscience and of the press — find their roots in Christianity."
Its thesis: Christianity (what we'd now call Catholicism) was a repressive force for hundreds of years. Secular freedom only came into the picture with the emergence of a successful heresy (Protestantism) + the need for Catholicism and Protestantism to unite against an external foe.
To be fair, I suppose one could argue that before the Reformation, most Christians weren't actually reading the Bible, and once they started reading the Bible, they realized the importance of secular freedoms.
I agree. Basically, if you don't want any Muslims in your country, you have two options. Well, three:
1. Discriminate against Muslims specifically. This is going to upset a lot of Muslim countries.
2. Discriminate against all religions (state atheism). In a country that is not majority atheist this is going to upset a lot of citizens.
3. Discriminate against non-Christians, but accept even superficial Christianity.
Muslim countries can't protest against 3, because they usually discriminate against non-Muslims themselves. Option 3 will upset outspoken atheists, especially if implemented in the Malaysian style ("a Pole is someone who is Catholic, habitually speaks Polish and conforms to Polish customs"), but you can dial in the level of discrimination by doing something like: "Germany is a secular country and shall make no concessions to religious customs, but, acknowledging its Christian heritage, will not abolish existing support for national traditions and customs of Christian origin" and happily ban elective circumcision, muezzin calls to prayer, face coverings (except carnival masks, of course) and sprinkle bacon crumbs on every school meal.
you can discriminate on ethno-national grounds and ancestry, which in practice is going to close off Muslim migration, although of course it won't stop ethnic Poles from converting to Islam.
a possible 4th solution is to decisively discriminate against all the violations of human rights, public health, public good and personal freedoms religions require to exist, without discriminating against the religions themselves. If the government was really keen on dishing out justice to people who violate the law for religious reasons, the religions would be defanged pretty quickly, and become mere mannerisms.
For example, if the policy is to tolerate absolutely no child abuse, ever, be it physical, mental, emotional or otherwise, and punish abusive parents with extreme severity, religion tends to erode the moment the children of religious parents find out they can just refuse to go to the temple and not face any consequences for it.
A fundamental part of religion, one needed for its survival is the ability to punish people for quitting, or trying to quit. If the government is happy to put you in prison for religious enforcement, then religious enforcement ends pretty quickly.
Do you think abuse is the only consequence parents have in their toolbox for enforcing rules? How do you think parents ought to respond to a kid who refuses to go to school or the doctor?
while i find the rebuttal persuasive, i have never heard anyone make this argument, and scott doesn’t give any examples of people making this argument. i guess it’s good to have considered one additional argument in favour of not being a conservative christian.
My thought as well. I thought there was going to be something about why it's good to celebrate Christmas even if you don't believe in Jesus or whatever, but it doesn't get into that much detail.
My guess is that this is really a straw argument masquerading as a real one, like the post Scott included in the links for last month that had some really interesting stuff about cultural explanations of declining birth rate, but then had two paragraphs at the end trying to smuggle in "and therefore we should accept the radical right-wing views on the following 15 topics".
Maybe this form of argument is common in a kind of neo-trad movement that is adjacent to anti-woke tech-center-right-ism?
I'm a deist, not an atheist per se, but I've heard the cultural Christianity argument coming out of my own mouth. In my case, the cultural Christianity argument makes sense because I don't care about classical liberalism. And I don't have any blanket condemnation of theocracies. It depends on the theocracy.
Ah yes, that post from Becoming Noble substack. It is a classic of the genre of hooking you in and then putting the radical stuff at the end. He literally proposes keeping young women uneducated and promoting teen pregnancy! I mean, he’s not wrong that it correlates with fertility (single greatest predictive variable through history for fertility rate is percentage of girls who leave formal education before age 15) but like damn.
"Ayaan gave a powerful response that Christianity had led to the "flourishing of Western civilization"....."""Everything that we inherited from [Christian faith], it's just too casual to cast that aside. When we've done it, I think we have caused ourselves a great deal of damage." Both are standard 'atheists should embrace cultural Christianity' tropes. Scott isn't saying proponents themselves are only 'cultural' Christians, though his sentence about where Hirsi is 'sort of coming from' is open to interpretation.
This argument has definitely become more common in Christian/atheist debates and especially related to Tom Holland’s book Dominion. Alex O’Connor is particularly annoyed by this argument but for different reasons than Scott (https://unherd.com/2024/06/the-trouble-with-political-christianity/).
Ironically, Tom Holland’s book actually ends up agreeing with Scott’s point in the last chapter (titled “Woke”) by suggesting that modern progressivism is the product of a Christian mindset that everyone has without noticing it ("This is Water").
This is a very common argument/belief in evangelical Christian circles, at least in my personal experience (was raised in devout Christian family, most of my family members and people I knew growing up were and continue to remain Christians, and most of them believe some version of this). I also wouldn't be surprised if Mormons and conservative Catholics believed something like this too, but I've had much less interaction with those groups.
Edit: it actually can go much further than this. Once again, this is my personal experience, but I was raised to believe (and still know many people who believe) that things secular people think of as Enlightenment values (rationality, tolerance, etc.) and even the scientific method came out of Christian culture. So, the theory goes, if you live in the west it's ultimately Christianity you can thank for the vaccines keeping you alive while you play video games on a supercomputer you can hold in your hand in a relatively tolerant, open society.
One final thought: another more secular example of someone who's argued something like this is Tyler Cowen. He doesn't advocate people lie and say Christianity is true if they don't believe it, but across blog posts he's certainly gestured towards the general idea that things we (including, maybe especially secular people) appreciate come from Christianity. The examples I can think of off the top of my head he's mentioned are the Christian influence on the abolitionist movement, and the general advice he's given that if people want to be happy they should be "more Mormon" (no drinking, get married, have children, etc.)
There's a nuance here, in that even if you don't accept Christianity *caused* all this stuff, you might be able to accept that it provided the meaning, purpose and good will toward men that allowed us to get on with it--and that if you take it away, it gets replaced with stuff that absolutely does not allow us to get on with it.
Not sure what you mean. You could mean a couple different things.
He argues against asserting the doctrines out of practicality (unrelated), and argues that an attempt to prop up Christainity may just end in the same place (mostly unrelated). If you're saying the latter implicitly accepts a closer link between Christianity and western ideas than just non-interference... my point is that it can be necessary without being sufficient.
From the article: "But the Cultural Christians would argue that such a flowering of culture and optimism could only happen within a generation or two of a Christian society."
You write: "you might be able to accept that it provided the meaning, purpose and good will toward men that allowed us to get on with it"
These seem to be the same premise; I'm not sure how else to read it. "Christianity provided the cultural basis for these things." Is this not what both are saying?
The first is the possibility that Christianity caused them. The second is the possibility that it just kind of didn't interfere (but fills a need normally filled by things that do interfere).
Not a massive distinction, but an outline of how it could be important even if you don't see a causal connection.
That seems to be the claim, but I think it gets things backwards. It is very plausible to me that Christianity gave an initial set of ideas that caused this stuff to develop, but it seems very implausible to me that these ideas couldn’t be sustained on their own terms.
Looking at the actual history of the ideas, I don't find that argument plausible. The ideas were either present or being developed before Christianity had ever been heard of.
OTOH, I do find that an essentially idle aristocracy was probably necessary. Also urban centers.
Christianity was, at best, an only slightly resistive medium. And it wasn't always only slightly resistive. (Usually, though, for political reasons, so one can argue that any other centralized power would have been nearly as bad.)
The ideas can be "sustained" in the sense of remaining logical or coherent, but they aren't a religion. The religious void has this way of getting filled.
Is there any reason to believe that Christianity is a safer religion to fill this void with than, say, Buddhism, or Norse paganism, or Unitarian Universalism, or Scientology, or Baha'i, or whatever?
Perhaps, but it's moot since we're talking about the value of supporting a pre-existing Christian tradition in western society. You can't ride Buddhist inertia that isn't there.
I don't think you can truly fill the void with Christianity in the long run, to be clear. I think true believers will keep declining.
It clearly wasn't memetically unfit, but I think that most modern analysis of *what* offered Christianity notable memetic fitness fails to account for the fact that evangelism was not a common feature of religions at the time, but an exceptional feature which set Christianity apart in its environment. Most discussions I've followed take for granted the assumption that contemporary religions were competing for followers, and Christianity won the competition, but the position I've heard represented more among religious historians is that other contemporary religions were, for the most part, not actively competing for followers.
It's very non-coincidental that most religious people today practice evangelistic religions, from a starting point where evangelistic religions were the exception. But I think centering the discussion on the religion's moral values, and pretending that it was playing the same kind of game as its competitors, is probably glossing over the most important feature.
Buddhism is, as far as I'm aware, the first evangelical religion in history, and it experienced a rapid spread for similar reasons. But Christianity has one major distinction from Buddhism in terms of memetic fitness, and that's its exclusivity. Buddhism was highly syncretic, and tended to pick up additional gods and cosmology everywhere it spread to. In many cases, Buddhism essentially became an additional feature within other preexisting religious cosmologies. In contrast, Christianity packaged in the idea that other types of religious belief and worship were actively wrong and harmful, and needed to be replaced. So while Buddhism had a similarly rapid spread, it didn't replace other local religious beliefs to the same extent.
It was successful at becoming a state religion, but that greatly increased the amount of political infighting, to the point that a large chunk of history of the Eastern Roman Empire is about obscure and yet vicious theological disputes between bishops of different cities.
A monotheistic religion that made claims of being universal had some downsides in an era when religious tolerance hadn't been invented yet.
Well, yeah, they had to duke it out (still happening), but let’s face it, being aligned with the center of power is an advantage don’t you think? God and gods have been going from many to one for quite a while. Is it called vertical integration in business school terminology?
Advantage for whom in what competition, though? It was good for the meme since it outcompeted other religions using state power. Though, Christianity spread pretty rapidly on its own, despite state suppression. Was it good for the state? Hard to say, since the Roman Empire was pretty successful with a different state religion. Was it good for the people? I guess it depends on which people we're talking about. Most people in the empire were poor farmers or slaves both before and after Christianity became a state religion.
They lasted over a thousand years, so I’m not sure if it makes sense to focus on how it ended. But from a modern perspective, there was an inability to fix ongoing problems. Picking a new emperor: never really solved, often violent. An insistence on religious uniformity despite disagreements resulted in often violent internal politics. (This foreshadows the religious wars after the Protestant Reformation.)
Unsurprisingly, most of the things Christianity gets falsely praised for, are simply long term outcomes of Roman and Greek thought permeating the culture. Its not about Jesus, its about Socrates.
What does the group of people who think this expect liberal atheists to do?
Is it as Scott suggests, go through the motions of being Christian, or is it something more along the lines of dont wage the war on Christmas. Revel in christian traditions and dont fight its influence on society (the latter doesnt seem to require much lieing)
Based on my admittedly sketchy understanding of fin de siecle England, I think it's the former: AIUI the Anglican Church (and Church attendance in general) had and has no real "teeth" in the sense of being an oppressive, totalizing theology (I forget who it was who observed that ironically, by making it a state religion, it essentially guaranteed that it was always going to be a social club first and a religion second, because there would never be any selection effect for committed religiosity), and instead provided a pleasant space to hang around in for an hour every Sunday while developing a sense of local community and reflecting on being charitable. But the thing is, you (and everyone else) still have to actually *go* to gain those benefits, instead of staying home and watching the footie.
It's like the cultural-values version of Type 2 fun.
Stop suing bakers who won't make gay cakes. Don't tell people who don't want porn in their kids library that they are book burning Nazis.
Oppose many interpretations of "civil rights". Support freedom of association for Christians.
Oppose immigration, especially of non-Christians (its quite obvious that a lot of this boils down to don't let Europe get flooded with low IQ muslims that turn it into a caliphate).
Allow universal school vouchers so Christians can teach their kids their values.
But those are all just basic conservative positions, with nothing specifically Christian about them. If the conclusion of the argument Scott's responding to is merely "be a conservative" then it's a terrible argument. It tries to prove too much (much more than necessary). "Because Christianity is awesome, you should defend religious freedom and Western values" implies (semantically not logically) that if you *don't* think Christianity is awesome you *shouldn't* defend those things. When actually you don't need to be Christian (cultural or otherwise) to see their value.
I'm not an atheist, but it should be blindingly obvious that atheism does not require leftism, and in fact the qualities atheism is usually taken to champion (reason, independent thought, freedom of speech) are entirely incompatible with leftism.
FWIW, I *don't* think Christianity is awesome. The best claim that might be defensible is something along the lines of "given human nature, Christianity keeps something worse from filling the same function", and I think that would be difficult to defend. Christianity not just tolerated, but actively supported pogroms, among other things.
Not 100% onboard with this set of policies, but my objections feel like they're closer to edge-case quibbling than irreconcilable core conflict. If I were locked in a room for a week with an advocate for that agenda, I like to think we'd be able to hammer out some mutually-agreeable compromise.
Probably the biggest sticking point would be that I'd want to ensure equal access to mainstream payment processors and other financial services for sex workers. I'm fine with that sort of thing being clearly labeled, isolated to some extent, and of course keeping kids out... but for somebody who makes their living drawing cartoon tits to have a harder time getting a mortgage, or using Paypal, relative to an equivalently successful professional in some less sex-related field, doesn't help anybody. On the contrary, driving it underground just turns the sector into an attractive nuisance, and utterly unnecessary fertile field for criminal exploitation.
The proper antidote for corruptive, misleading, dangerous porn isn't state-backed repression and abstinence-only ignorance. Gotta sort out some kind of broad societal standard for wholesome, educational, life-affirming porn. Maybe something a little bit like the Comics Code Authority, plus fact-checking from actual scientists? Pretty sure the J-man Himself was willing to deal fairly with prostitutes, and wasn't a fan of letting moneychangers wield too much power.
Those aren't Christian culture, they're policies intended to protect a Christian minority from being bulldozed by a non-Christian majority, or perhaps to protect Christian proles from being bulldozed by non-Christian elites.
Mormons have socially conservative values but they tend not to worry about civilizational decline because, 1. The church is increasingly international in orientation. 2. Mormons have the confidence that they can cohere and survive as a people, whatever happens to their Nation or civilization. And who knows, they may be right about that.
<i>Once again, this is my personal experience, but I was raised to believe (and still know many people who believe) that things secular people think of as Enlightenment values (rationality, tolerance, etc.) and even the scientific method came out of Christian culture.</i>
The scientific method was only formalised once, and that was in an environment where 99% of people were Christian. "The scientific method came out of Christian culture" is a straightforwardly true historical statement.
No. The scientific method is a continuing process of development, that has strong threads reaching back to Aristotle and his companions (and probably before). And there is no particular point where you can say "That's where/when it was created", because it's still being created.
Are statistical arguments valid? Which ones, and how valid?
This is still being developed. The solution will probably require doing away with the concept of "truth' and replacing it with a term meaning something like "a model consistent with all the reliable data that we have access to".
That's just off the top of my head. There are other similar topics, and currently different sciences have different rules for what constitutes "the scientific method". The experimental sciences use methods that are very different from the observational science.
I, also, was raised to believe lots of lies. People who live in cities are inherently more tolerant than those who live in small communities, because they have to get along with a wider divergence of different people. So that's one source of tolerance. (In past times, most people lived in agricultural [i.e., small] communities. And speed of communication also needs to be factored in, though there you don't have the feedback of "if you're too obnoxious, we'll kill you".)
Rationality dates back to some time before the Hellenic (or is it Hellenistic?) period. Probably lots before, but the records dwindle away. And the scientific method can be traced back that far too, though it was still being developed, so it hadn't been fully developed. Possibly the scientific method is the result of Alexander encouraging communication between Greek and Hindi philosophers. (I'm not sure they were Hindus as we understand the term.)
Just because you were raised with a belief doesn't justify holding that belief as an adult.
"People who live in cities are inherently more tolerant than those who live in small communities"
I think if you poll both populations on their support for hate speech laws and cancel culture, regulations on the minute operations of businesses, whether you need permission to cut down a tree on your property, whether you're allowed to not make a particular requested cake, you'd find that's not remotely true.
Reporting this comment for being (a) rude (b) contentless (c) maximally low-effort (d) utterly unsubstantiated (e) contributing nothing to the discussion and (f) far below the expected standards here.
Rationality goes back to at least Ancient Egypt 5-6kya (4k BCE), because they had not-matched-for-thousands of years complex multi-step chemistry that gave them various dyes, pigments, and blue faience.
This is on top of smelting and metallurgy, astronomy, math, and geometry.
I don't think you can really make that claim on that basis. (There are others.) Multi-step processes that are refined over multiple generations can be achieved via pattern matching, with no rational thought required. OTOH, we can trace the evolution of the pyramid, because the earlier forms are still around (including at least one that fell down). It's easier to argue that rational thought was required to make the transition (especially to the one where the Pharaoh's name was engraved on a sheet of plaster that hid the name of the architect...until after a few years of rain and weather washed the plaster away).
This isn't meant to imply that you are wrong in the assumption that rational thought was involved in the development of, e.g., Egpytian cosmetics and poisons, just that the evidence has eroded away.
That said, there's a very decent argument that rational though is just a special kind of pattern matching, but I don't think it really suffices. I think it also involves developing correspondences between disjoint domains. (Which is why I think pure LLMs can't be rational and can't be true intelligences. But that robots wouldn't be so limited.) I expect that developing this kind of map will be one of the things required to solve the "hallucination" problem. (It will also need an adversarial censor...though in ineffective one may already be present.)
> So, the theory goes, if you live in the west it's ultimately Christianity you can thank for the vaccines keeping you alive while you play video games on a supercomputer you can hold in your hand in a relatively tolerant, open society.
I suppose we can do that once we finish thanking Islam, and before that the Greeks and Romans. It's a very silly argument.
Just off the top 'o me head: Ross Douthat and anyone he quotes. The whole First Things roster. Creeps like Adrian Vermeule. Basically, devout Christian pundits and 'intellectuals', who have become vastly more represented in the discourse since Trump, and exponentially more tedious as a result.
I stumble on your first block. I can’t honestly vouch for something that I think is a steaming pile.
Otoh, I’m not opposed to using the non-useless parts of Christian ideas. “Love thy neighbour “ and that sort of thing. I think one can use the ideas (since they’re there anyway) without buying the whole ridiculous backstory.
But without at least some parts of the backstory many many people will not willingly buy in to the non-useless parts. And society is so hard to manage when that happens.
I think this is the much stronger argument. There are moralistic behaviours that can potentially make the individual's life worse in any given situation, but that if everyone subscribes to them make everyone's life better (eg. honesty). Christianity is both a Schelling point for collective morality (it's the rules God says it is) and a threatened enforcement mechanism. Absent it, we're sliding towards a world where being privately moral (eg. when no-one will know/you won't suffer negative consequences) is becoming increasingly alien. I'd be inclined to file the growth of utilitarianism and quasi-folk-utilitarianism ("it's not going to hurt anyone") under "collapse of private morality" as well, but I'm conscious some people consider that a good thing.
I am inclined to disagree with you on how strong that argument is. The trouble with the backstory supporting the non-useless parts is that you have to really believe it is true. Believe it down to the blood and bone, the way my 5 year old believes there is a spider in the basement bathroom that will eat her after dark. If you don't have that kind of belief, you are right back to your private morality because the enforcement mechanism becomes a very weak threat, one made weaker by the fact you never see it happen to anyone. Indeed, it is probably the weakest of threats; at least with things like "no one will like you" or "you will go to prison" there are the occasional examples of them actually happening to reference.
I don't think it has to be a very credible threat. I think it has to be an excuse. At the moment, if people who are basically inclined to be moral look around at everyone else not obeying the same rules and ask, "why should I?" "God wants me to," even for a fairly tenuous belief in God, will do as an excuse to obey otherwise-arbitrary moral rules, as will "everyone else does" for the remaining atheists. Probably the sweet spot is "everyone else does," but I think you just need a fairly weak attractor towards morality to counter-balance the creeping entropy of defection.
I think it's more useful to think "God thinks I should" than "God wants me to". God, omnipotently, knows what is best for you and the universe, and gives guidelines that, if followed, tend toward that. So you ought to do what God thinks because you and/or society will be better if you do.
This is coming from an atheistic viewpoint. The Bible's commandments have been tried and found useful through history, so we know they work well for society by experience. If there were things wrong, they would not have survived this long. And maybe the first commandments were different, and evolved to their current state, which has now been stable for hundreds of years.
>This is coming from an atheistic viewpoint. The Bible's commandments have been tried and found useful through history, so we know they work well for society by experience.
In what sense? An institution can be stable without necessarily being good for human happiness. The institution of slavery was longer-lived than Christianity has been so far, so in a sense it certainly "worked," but that doesn't mean either that we could stably return to it in a modern environment, or that it ever made humans happier on net.
I agree in a sense, but “I won’t be a good person otherwise” is an equally viable excuse. It also benefits from most everyone being pretty sure they exist.
I'm not sure this is true. I think you can also get a lot of sticking to Christian teachings because everyone expects that of you and visibly breaking from them will be socially costly. That seems to be most of the enforcement mechanism of wokism. It is subject to sudden change when the preference falsification cascade collapses, but until then....
Yes, but that doesn't solve the problem of people behaving the right way when no one else is looking or they don't expect to be caught. You are correct that doing what you are supposed to do when it will be visibly obvious that you are not is pretty difficult to break away from, and most people won't (this is what makes e.g. blatant shoplifting such a shocking thing). The challenge for social control is getting people to behave properly when they think no one will know.
This is the part of Jordan Peterson's views that I actually think is correct (if I understand JBP at all, which at times is difficult and not worth the hours/years it might take to deep dive). Stories are powerful and they matter. Where I get off that bus is when those stories are labeled Truth, even if they lead to moderately large coordination gains.
Religious people will also say this about many bible stories. The old nun who taught my RCIA class used to say "The Bible is full of stories, all of them are true and some of them even happened."
There can be value in the story of David and Goliath or the Flood (both favorite stories of my kids when they were small!) even if those things never actually happened. Jesus' parables don't really require that there was ever a dude who owned a vinyard and responded to his tenants killing all the people he sent to demand his rent by sending his son, say.
I mean, there is capital-T truth in a lot of literature that nobody thinks is literally true, from the Odyssey to Julius Caesar to Persuasion to Kim to Lord of the Rings to Things Fall Apart. And also there is value in having a set of cultural references that almost everyone knows and that can be used in analogies and discussions easily.
Those are distinct from thinking there was ever actually a great flood that covered the whole Earth with water, or that anyone's wife literally turned into a pillar of salt because she looked back. Or for that matter, that Odysseus really blinded a cyclops or that Gandalf really went head-to-head with a Balrog.
I'm not sure if that's Peterson's point because I haven't read much of his work, but it does capture a couple reasons why reading Old Testament stories can be valuable even though a lot of those stories can't possibly be literally true.
Disagree on the definition of true. When I slap a square on the corner of a building, I'm checking to see if it's true, and that's enough to build a building that stands up very well. A scientist with a ultra precision instrument could probably come along and "well, actually" me about that, but if the building stands up well, I'm still correct about that corner being true.
If nothing is actually true because you insist on measuring it in units that are too granular to use, the word means nothing and we get nothing accomplished.
How would you even propose to measure bare metal Truth, anyway?
"True within some tolerance" is not the same as "true due to some cosmic narrative or cultural meme" -- hey aren't the same thing. I can say that my desk is 60" long and claim it's true to my measurement and accept that I'm leaving some precision out. That's not the same as saying Deity preferred that I do my work at a robust desk and thus I find myself in possession of one. The capital-T Truth is exactly where the latter thing fits, no matter its cultural utility, and it is not the same as the first thing.
the problem with Truth in stories, Bible included, is that after you excise all the obvious nonsense, bad memetics, prejudices, irrelevant cultural references, and glaringly unethical bits from the ancient story, the reminder is awkward gibberish.
I own one "Bible for Kids" bought for entertainment value. Its a mashup of the Old and The New Testament with all the cruel and obviously ghastly bits removed to make it kid friendly, or in fact, sanity-friendly. The outcome is a collection of plot holes and bizarre mental gymnastics. My favorite is their version of the Flood story: since the author did not want to admit that God used the flood for mass genocide, it to a unique story in which Noah gathered his family and the animals on the Ark so that god could essentially power-wash the planet without hurting anyone.
My idea is that labelling everything not strictly proven as "a steaming pile" is counter-artistic. Like it or not there's a special relationship between art and woo.
Not going to mince words, there's some unbelievably sloppy and lazy thinking in a lot of these comments about "asserting false things", "things contrary to science" and so on.
What do you actually mean by "the whole ridiculous backstory"? And what do others mean by "false things" and "the propositions of Christianity"? Some clarity and precision would be nice.
If you mean belief in God, well anyone who thinks "science" disproves God needs to go back to school and learn the difference between science and philosophy. This is a really embarassing thing to say. Scientists can of course argue against the existence of God but by doing so they are by definition not doing science.
If you mean belief in various miracles, that's far more relevant. But would then require an examination of which claimed miracles are actually essential to being a metaphysical Christian of some kind. I'd guess that the most easily refuted miracle claims are the least important for Christian belief, and the most important are the least easily refuted. Probably the only material miracle one need believe to be a Christian in the most basic sense is the resurrection of Christ. Perhaps an argument can be made that a single belief that a single person came back to life two thousand years ago is incompatible with a scientific worldview, but I'd like to see it actually made.
All this of course is not even mentioning the fact that being a "cultural Chistian" does not generally mean accepting any metaphysical claims at all, but other people have made that point.
The “backstory” I was alluding to is any of the supernatural stuff….or “miracles”, if you will. The stuff that requires belief without evidence ie faith. Resurrection would be one such example. Virgin birth is another.
I agree that science doesn’t “disprove” god….since you can’t “prove” the absence of something. My position there is that the hypothesis that “god exists” has not been proven, and thus I accept the null (ie that god doesn’t exist).
Like I said, I actually don’t object to some, perhaps even many, of the generic Christian teachings. I take them for what they are, which is some life lessons that in some cases have stood the test of time.
"Love thy neighbour" isn't particularly unique to Christianity, though. ("The Bible and the Quran teach us to love each other, but the Kama Sutra is more precise.")
AFAICT, the best thing Christianity did *as compared to what the alternative would have been" is the pretty strict prohibition on cousin marriage (for some time in the late 1st and early 2nd millennium extending as far as sixth cousins!), largely breeding clannish tendencies out of the northwestern European population.
That's presumably why he says that's not the argument he's expecting other people to follow. He understands that it's a personal preference, and that some people may find utility in asserting falsehoods.
If I remember correctly, Scott used to have a patient that suffered from anxiety, and she was particularly scared that she would leave her hair dryer on when she left to work. Scott's solution was to have her bring her hair dryer with her to work, and the issue was resolved.
To nitpick a bit, he doesn't claim to have offered this solution, but to have endorsed someone else's suggestion of it.
I think it's fair though to draw a distinction between this and believing false things for their utility. It's an otherwise unnecessary behavior if not for one's own irrationality, but it's definitely not *false* to believe that if your hair dryer is in your car, you must not have left it on at home.
That is perhaps false, but in an entirely different sense of the word, I think. The hair dryer is a magnet for free-radical anxiety; the true source of the anxiety might never be discovered; let the hairdryer become the totem to contain and vanquish the anxiety. Just like religion…
From a strictly scientific and empirical viewpoint, how do you know that a hairdryer you're not looking at is turned off? Only by induction, and induction can sometimes be wrong: I put a straw on a donkey's back so it can carry it, then another, and another...the donkey can carry any amount of straw.
Most people are comfortable with the idea of object permanence, and that if you check to be sure the hair dryer is off then it remains off. But can one definitively say it is FALSE that the hair dryer will burn down the house? Some unlikely ways it could be true: someone else turns the hair dryer on and leaves it, a power surge goes through the wiring and ignites it, the (admittedly tiny amounts of) radioactive materials in it happen to radiate in such a way as to concentrate gamma rays enough to cause ignition.
He endorses that solution in the greater context of something he *absolutely* supports, and he also gave the example of treating Joshua Norton like the Emperor. Scott has no issue with supporting the belief of false things so long as those false things allow him to live more comfortably in the Bay Area.
That also doesn't strike me as an example of believing in false things. Joshua Norton may have been delusional, but that doesn't mean that any of the people humoring him actually believed he was in any practical sense the Emperor. Treating him like one was essentially a local cultural tradition which didn't entail any particular factual belief.
No, I know the incident, I just don't see how that solution requires believing anything false. "If my hairdryer is with me, it won't burn down the house" isn't false! And even if I believed in something false ("if my hairdryer is in the house, my house will burn down"), the solution itself doesn't require believing anything false.
The solution was to perform the rituals one would perform if she actually believed the false thing, even though rationally she didn’t. Which is what atheist cultural Christians do.
I think actual Christians would take a fairly dim view of that; you're only saved if you *believe* in Jesus, not just go through the motions, they're very clear about that.
To me the difference is that the "rituals" for the hairdryer don't involve affirming any particular belief about the hairdryer; whereas the "rituals" for Christianity involve affirming the beliefs of Christianity. Like saying prayers that explicitly state the teachings of Christianity.
And, probably most crucially, raising your children to be Christian, which presumably involves teaching them that Christianity is true.
In what way is this asserting a false thing? It’s a workaround, like using a paper clip when your fly zipper breaks. I guess if she started worrying about her stove, it might get complicated though.
Second, that’s not how I interpret the hair dryer incident. The question of honesty doesn’t come up there… nobody is tempted to lie. There’s just a Cheap Trick that clearly helps, even though you could argue it doesn’t treat the Root Cause.
Basically, he determined that it was better for his patient to carry on behaving as if she believed that she was in danger of burning her house down with a neglected hairdryer, because carrying the hairdryer to work was much less costly that attempting (and probably failing) to directly correct her OCD induced delusion.
It’s not a perfect match, in part because in the hairdryer case, the false belief had purely negative effects (but correcting it would have had higher costs).
Still, it seems to me to be a case where Scott acknowledged that maintaining false beliefs could indeed be practical, no scare quotes required. Therefore I found his dismissal here flippant (even though at the end of the day I agree with him that the version of cultural Christianity he argues against here is not a panacea).
I don't know if it matters, but Scott confirmed in the comments that the "hairdryer" was changed to protect patient anonymity, and it was actually something more likely to cause a fire, like a curling iron (he didn't say specifically what it was). So it might not have been a delusion per se that her risk was at a (very small) risk of burning down.
I don’t think that really matters. But I also didn’t think the point of an analogy was to nitpick the tiny ways it’s not a perfect one, yet here we are.
It's because you made a specific claim -- "Scott has previously espoused doing basically that [asserting false things] if it's helpful to address a mental illness", and your example of him doing this was the hair dryer story. It's not really nitpicking to point out that the hair dryer story does not involve or advocate the assertion of false things!
Tolerating the continued existence of a deeply-entrenched, otherwise-trivial false belief is very different from building a globally-relevant one from scratch.
The hairdryer is not "you should believe in false things because that belief brings non-epistemic benefits".
It is "it is sometimes ok to take illegible actions to prevent negative effects (such as anxiety) from false beliefs."
It seems obvious that not all our beliefs are well calibrated all the time. Some people will religiously disinfect their toilet seats, others will not bother. Clearly, at least one of these groups is objectively wrong in their risk assessment. As rationalists, they should investigate what the optimum sanitation level is, then take therapy until they are comfortable with it.
In actual fact, there are high opportunity costs to fixing your pre-existing beliefs, and it is likely you would spent more time in therapy learning that toilet seats are not as icky as you think than you would spend pointlessly disinfecting them in your life (if disinfection is uncalled for).
If Scott had said: "Everyone should try to believe that their hairdryer is likely to burn their house down, and take their dryers with them to prevent that from happening", that would be similar to him endorsing Christianity.
The point of this post by Scott is to argue against the proposition that atheists should be “cultural Christians” e.g. they should participate in Christian community rituals even though they don’t believe in God.
Or, rephrasing, “it is sometimes okay to take illegible actions (spending a couple hours a week in a church) to prevent negative effects (society collapsing to “modernism”)”
In both cases, one is being encouraged to “lean into” a false belief because it has a better outcome than fighting the false belief. I already acknowledged the difference between “direct positive effects of false belief” vs “avoiding negatives from false beliefs” in another comment.
That doesn't work so well for somebody like me. Last time I attended an after-church discussion group, I idly asked a guy sitting next to me some quick yes-or-no philosophical questions about the compatibility of his theological positions with certain capabilities of modern medicine, gave him a succinct and consistent but alarmingly-phrased answer when he asked what he'd just agreed to, and his resulting crisis of faith apparently resulted in the weekly meeting being permanently canceled, never to recur without stricter official supervision. Whole garden-path argument can't have been more than five minutes start to finish. Apparently, traditional social role I naturally slot into is "tempter demon."
Don't feel bad, tempter demons fill a vital niche in any theological ecosystem.
I think deliberately leading people to uncomfortable realizations about their beliefs when they have not consented to debating said beliefs would be a bit evil, but if it was either accidental or if the guy was actively entering the ring of debate it would be ok.
Me personally feeling, or being, bad isn't the issue I'm concerned with here. However vital such a role may be in theory, that particular "ring of debate" shattered the moment I touched it. Thus, either the system which produced it is not generally fit to build things which last, https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2009-04-09 or the way they sometimes manage requires sanitizing database inputs to exclude Bobby Tables, Susan Ignore-All-Previous-Instructions, siggorts, the no-eyed girl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbG2lbzaSdA and myself.
"a person affected by a false belief may take an illegible action to avoid bad consequences of having that belief, if losing their belief is not feasible"
and
"we should collectively take illegible actions associated with false beliefs".
If it helps pry you loose, most forms of Cultural Christianity do not require to you to recite the Nicene Creed. It is sufficient to conduct yourself as if the claims of Christianity were true, excepting perhaps "you need to go to church" and the like.
But more importantly, if you don't like asserting false things, where do you get the confidence that the things you assert to be true are true?
Seems to me that this whole "cultural Christianity" gambit only works in the long run if the new generation does it, and it's much harder to get them on board from a young age without asserting the actual doctrines of Christianity.
> if you don't like asserting false things, where do you get the confidence that the things you assert to be true are true?
I don't see how those two things are connected? I'm pretty confident that the sky is blue, but it's not because I enjoy telling people that the sky is green.
the problem is, if you strip Cultural Christianity of all the obvious nonsense and anti-ethics, the core that remains is basically "be a decent chap and don't hurt others".
Its not clear to me why we need to call it Cultural Christianity, and not just Cultural Common Sense + (occasionally) Santa Claus.
The standard response here is that what we see as "just be a good guy" is informed by Christian ethics and anthropology, and once you pull those away the justification for what seems to be common-sense good-guy behavior erodes. Then you counter with examples of civilizations that had the Golden Rule without Christian influence. We go back-and-forth on that until one of us loses interest. I believe this is Standard Internet Argument #74.
Instead I'm going to offer an argument grounded in The Nightmare Before Christmas. I read a fascinating Twitter thread about the enduring appeal of this 1993 film, which I can attest to as it is Halloween and I have been introducing my children to it. From the start I'll say that this can't explain all of the appeal, or even is a plurality explanation. But it's something. The basic argument is this:
Jack Skellington encounters Christmas Town, and is enchanted by all the trappings. He wants to celebrate it but he doesn't understand the "why" at the core of Christmas. There's a whole song devoted to how he tries to figure it out but he remains completely befuddled. And we shouldn't be surprised, because the trappings of Christmas - the trees, the lights, the food, Santa, winter, gifts, the secular music - don't tell us anything about the Incarnation of God in the form of Jesus Christ.
Interestingly, the film never resolves the "what is Christmas?" question. The only secular media ever to go all the way with that was Linus's little monologue in A Charlie Brown Christmas. But most other media fall back to a True Meaning of Christmas lesson that's vaguely about caring for other people and not being materialistic. TNBC doesn't do that. It could, it easily could. Instead it shifts to a message about cultural exchange and staying in your lane. It never actually provides an answer to Charlie Brown's question: "What is Christmas all about?" The argument is that TNBC resonates because secular celebrations of Christmas have the same crisis: asking the question of what's this all about, and the associated dissatisfaction of not getting an answer.
My extension of this argument is that the aspects of Christianity that we decide to retain once we've stripped out the parts that you don't like will intuitively seem hollow. You'll quickly have people asking "why Santa, though?" and there won't be a satisfactory answer. And I'm skeptical that we can maintain a civilization that doesn't understand anything at all about why it's doing what it does. Or, to make a more modest claim, if we're relying on cultural artifacts of Christianity (e.g., Santa) to keep civilization going, those artifacts don't have staying power without their core meaning, so we probably can't rely on them. If we're going to use cultural Christianity to stay afloat, it needs to be genuinely Christian at its core.
Was there something about the original argument that tried to make a rational case for Christianity being a cultural tradition that is uniquely well-placed to prevent this kind of degeneration, rather than just the empirical case that Christian societies are the only societies that didn't? You seem to demolish the empirical case pretty soundly, but I didn't know if there was meant to be a rational case as well, or if they just picked Christianity at random out of the phone book, or just because it was the religion they happened to practice?
The original argument is that Christianity is what has led to the virtues modern liberals like (and, indeed, that it provides a reason for them that the liberals don't have anymore, so naturally the virtue wears out). This goes for non-Christian societies too-- they take ideas like the dignity of all men, loving your neighbor (if they do accept that), and science from Christianity.
I think there's an argument that goes: If you're not happy with the way things are in 2024, the only way out is back the way you came. There have been many forms of Christianity over 2,000 years, and you can stop at the form that suits you. But you've got to pick one of them.
I would want to see that case made, that liberalism as a value system can’t support itself without Christianity, or that Christianity is more supportive of it than, say, Buddhism or Norse paganism or whatever.
Norse paganism (in so far as we know it) was NOT supportive of liberal values. Of course, most of what we know either came from viking invader or stories curated by Christian monks. Many other polytheistic traditions, however, would be so supportive. (At least with a bit of careful selection.)
OTOH, it's worth remembering that we never know what the "folk traditions" were of things long ago. Usually we know at most what stories the aristocrats liked.
I agree that the descriptions we have of 10th century Norse paganism are not supportive of liberal values!
But it's also true that the descriptions we have of 10th century Christianity are not particularly supportive of liberal values either.
It's reasonable to say that Christianity is a big tent, and that some forms are favorable and others are not - but once you recognize that complexity, it should be clear that you would need to do a *lot* of work to differentiate the forms of Christianity that are from the ones that aren't, and *also* do a *lot* of work to figure out if there are relevant variations of non-Christian religions that might be even better.
My guess is that just as various other pagan religions have had times and places that seemed more or less supportive of liberal values, there would be times and places where Norse paganism would have been as well, had there been a larger population practicing it over a wider variety of places and economic circumstances. There's not obviously anything intrinsic to Christianity that makes it better suited to this.
The Norse pagans were prodigious slavers. It was their meat and potatoes. Their major form of income. Their raison d’etre. The Normans - the descendants of Vikings who converted to Christianity were strongly anti slavery. Some of this is changing economic systems and settling down - but a lot of it was Christianity.
Contemporary Christianity wasn't exactly supportive of liberal values either. It's almost like liberal values are an emergent property of increased technological and economic development, rather than a consequence of which old stories people happened to favor at the time.
it was far more complex that that. Norse culture was astonishingly liberal in some aspects (like say, divorce) and extremely conservative in others (like for example, nudity). Case in point, under their law a woman could divorce her husband for the immoral crime of walking shirtless in public.
Being homosexual was not illegal in the Norse culture, (though being a "bottom" was shamed). However, calling a man a gay slur was dueling offense, a an easy way to die.
Gender-fluidity was extremely frowned upon, and considered a sign of witchcraft. However, full and total gender-switching was acceptable (see: the graves of shield-maidens who were biologically female but geared up as 100% male) and even enshrined in their myths (See; Brunhildr).
Even economically, the Norse ideal of noble largesse worked as both a form of local Socialism and like Libertarian Trickle Down in small scale at the same time.
The ideas of liberalism and conservatism they had do not map onto ours at all.
A pretty compelling description of the ways the teachings of Jesus transformed how people think and laid the foundations for much of what modern humans hold dear, including both wokeness and secularism.
Reasoning from limited evidence, a single example. If the Industrial and subsequent Technological revolutions had occurred during the heyday of liberal Islam (Moorish Spain perhaps) this article would be arguing for Cultural Islam. Or any number of other, relatively (remember Christianity became much more liberal as part of the revolutions, it was not that way to begin with) liberal cultures through history.
Please give some recommendations then. I hopped off this train back in the early-2010s around the decline of the new atheist movement so I'm unfamiliar with any new developments. Re-learning about the history of science and Catholicism was one of the important in-roads that brought me back to the church.
I accept that many people have argued that. I've even read a few. Generally they prove their assumptions by their conclusions. And they often get history wrong.
There are _many_ circumstances and environments under which the industrial revolution didn't start, because it only started in a single country at a single time. From that argument alone, you can't assign an outsized causality to Christianity.
I'd bet against you on this one. Far am I from being a historian but it seems to me like plenty of progress was made during the golden age of islam. That's why we use arabic numerals and algebra's called what it is, eh? If islamic countries had a period like that around the 18th century instead of the 10th or whatever, that'd seem like as good a place as any for it to start
That's not a bad argument per se, but the weakness in it is that the industrial revolution really could have started way earlier. The Romans were right about there in the time of Christ, as were the Chinese. Both had huge empires, one of which encompassed where the revolution actually took off 1600 years later. The Islamic world's golden age could well have produced it, but instead degenerated into the sort of top down slave society we worry about today. Almost anywhere in the western Christian world could have produced it too, but also failed.
I tend to think that Christianity is less of a requirement as a result, possibly necessary but certainly not sufficient. Certainly not Catholic Christianity or probably even 'normal' Protestant... people often forget that by the time of the industrial revolution the Church of England had been rocking its own thing for quite some time!
You aren't exactly wrong, but you are addressing the wrong aspect. We are talking the cultural/religious angle, with which ACOUP agrees: Rome didn't have the economic culture to launch the IR, as evidenced by the fact they didn't, or even get anything very close.
On the tech side... I think ACOUP is rather wrong. Primarily about the importance of coal. He does note that coal was used for fuel, but makes the common historian mistake of claiming that it was necessary for production and only started being used because people ran out of wood. (See this good explanation of the economics here: https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-the-coal-conquest ). Wood is inefficient, but it is farmable and had been for quite sometime.
ACOUP also focuses on the weaving industry a bit too much I think. While it was important in the Industrial Revolution we had, I don't know that it is the ONLY thing that could be important in starting an industrial revolution. I suspect many industrial clusters could spur the take off between use of mechanical procedures, specialization of roles, division of labor, and mass market trading, and cloth production just happened to be the one we got.
It is fair to say that Rome was not a few years aware from an IR but rather a couple centuries, but that is still a big deal; moving the IR 1000 years earlier is massive. The important question isn't exactly "how many 10's of years away were they?" because that isn't exactly clear, but rather why didn't they make the next few steps given they were within range. Because again, unless one hard assumes that it the IR MUST come from weaving and coal on rivers (and lots of places have coal and rivers) then the answer for why some places had an IR and others didn't seems to be either dumb luck or culture.
Likewise that mode of questioning is what is needed to think about things like "Why, when technology is seemingly very easily spreadable, are some countries rich while others poor? Indeed, why are some PARTS of one country poor while others are rich?"
> It is fair to say that Rome was not a few years aware from an IR but rather a couple centuries, but that is still a big deal; moving the IR 1000 years earlier is massive.
That isn't accurate either though! Even if you ignore everything else, they also lacked the advanced cannon technology that enabled the construction of primitive steam engines. It was only due to the arrival of gunpowder from China, followed by centuries of constant warfare in Europe spurring an existential arms race that led metallurgy to get to the point where the IR was even possible.
Islamic Golden Age ended when the Mongols literally and figuratively trampled their scientific brains under the hooves of their steppe ponies. The fall of Baghdad pretty much meant that the following Islamic culture was a Post-Apocalyptic one.
Europe and Christianity would look about the same if the Mongols decided to not stop at Legnica but push for Rome, pummel it to custard, and then strip land tot he bedrock on their way back home.
They're *called* Arabic numerals, but they actually come from India. And a lot of the Arabic knowledge of "the golden age" was imported from Egypt.
It's really hard (effectively impossible) to trace the flows of knowledge in the distant past. Most of the records have been lost. But there's significant evidence that there were flows along the silk routes (there wasn't just one). Certainly Alexander did a lot to increase the flow during his lifetime. (I have a friend who believes that Aristotle's mother came from India. I don't find the evidence convincing, but he could be right.)
We use Arabic numerals because they are more useful, and the term Algebra is borrowed from Arabic, but like alcohol, isn’t unique to Arabia. Also the areas invaded by Islam were the richest parts of the Roman Empire in the east and North Africa. Islam didn’t add much that wasn’t already there and the golden age was pretty relative.
"Arabic" numerals aren't actually Arab at all, they're from India. The most prestigious scientists of the golden age of Islam generally weren't Arabs either, but other ethnicities like Persians who had been conquered by Muslims. And scientific progress ground to a halt after such conquests, even if not immediately.
As Adrian has stated, the industrial revolution only happened once independently. The problem is that the inventions have to happen on the pathway of economic viability: the real world is not like Civilization, where a state simply decides that now would be a good time to research steam engines and allocates their research budget to them for a few years. Instead, you require coal mines which have to be pumped dry, because the first steam engines are kinda shitty and not worthwhile to run unless you can use coal for free. You need to have perfected casting cannon barrels so you have the tech to make cylinders. You need mechanized looms so that you have a viable consumer of mechanical power who can pay the bills until you eventually invent the railway.
Of course, you also have a lot of social requirements. If slave labor to pump out your mines in cheap enough, none of the elites will ever try to find a better way to do things. You need a certain class capable of working of inventors, if making an atmospheric engine gets you kicked out of the blacksmith's guild, that would be bad. You also need some class for whom it is acceptable to make money through selling machines.
I can hear you saying "well, Newton happened before the steam engine started paying any bills". This is correct: there was certainly a period of interest in science before the industrial revolution happened, and it could be argued that this was yet another prerequisite.
I am however doubtful that this was a direct consequence of Christianity. Yes, Mendel, the first to figure out how genetics work was a Catholic abbot. But if Christianity is uniquely suited for scientific discovery, why did it take them some 1850 years to make that discovery? Granted, you first need to figure out how pollination works, but that is something which you could discover with a few glass boxes and scientific curiosity.
I am very skeptical about the very hard line of economic viability of inventions you mention. I suspect many different paths of mechanization of industry exist, we just happened to get the coal-weaving path so availability bias suggests it has to be that one. There are probably dozens of other options that would have suited as well, but we just didn't get them first.
> It is not clear to me that there is a plausible and equally viable alternative path from an organic economy to an industrial one that doesn’t initially use coal (much easier to gather in large quantities and process for use than other fossil fuels) and which does not gain traction by transforming textile production (which, as we’ve discussed, was a huge portion of non-agricultural production in organic economies), though equally I cannot rule such alternatives out.
Personally, I think that the coal mines which needed to be pumped out were the bottleneck. If you run atmospheric engines for your coal mines long enough, someone is going to discover a better steam engine which will become good enough to pump out water in your other mines. The spinning jennies just waiting for something to provide torque were certainly speeding development along, but even without them we would have likely gotten the first railway by now.
Yea I know he says that. It is possible he is not conversant on all the different methods and use of fossil fuels, or even various organic fuel sources (such as clean burning whale oil, or just charcoal.) He says he can't rule them out himself.
And again, even if we grant that the coal -> steam engine -> weaving path is the necessary one, it isn't as though coal is uncommon, weaving is uncommon or the need to pump out water is that uncommon. Pumps existed, pretty much everyone weaves things, coal is all over. Britain does have the benefit of having a lot of rivers and everywhere being pretty close to the ocean, so there is that; it makes coal much easier to transport, something like 10x easier. Rivers are not terribly uncommon, however.
IFIAK China was too rich and had a reach long enough that they never ran into the problem that spurred the necessity of the industrial revolution in britain:
The security of the state depended on a supply of hardwood trees of sufficient size and age to build ships and to run industry, AND the supply of such trees was completely tapped out where they could be easily acceed, AND there was easily accessible coal that needed large scale pumping to access, AND industrial supplies of suitable metal were plentiful enough to not make it cheaper to just use eg. slaves.
The best argument I've heard, from Deirdre McCloskey, is that it was specifically protestant Christianity where the industrial revolution flourished because it allowed more space for individual conscience and agency than Catholicism.
Or perhaps it's the flavor of Christianity where most people are doomed to hell, but God will save the elect. And you can tell that you're of the elect because you can make a lot of money.
It is not entirely incorrect to be suspect of proposals to "Retvrn", because indeed, the past became the present (and one cannot cut-and-paste the past to the present, regardless). However, it is also not correct to assume that the same faults are predetermined to recur; one would not necessarily expect 17th century Christianity, returned in spirit and practice to the Apostolic Era, to recapitulate Donatism, or many of the other heresies defeated in the intervening years.
A return in the sense of rewinding entails memory ablation; a return in the sense of reiteration is an opportunity to learn from mistakes.
But if we're counting on being able to learn from mistakes and not repeat the previous course of progression, we're probably best off going to something actually good in its own right, rather than something that progressed to what we like last time.
On the one hand, I expect we have different identifications of that which is good in its own right. Bracketing that, however, that something is not a priori perfect does not seem to be reason to discount it entirely, especially with complex systems. This very quickly becomes a Bayesian problem, no? Allocating proportionate commitment to refinement and iteration in accordance with perceived learning capacity, distance to goal, and clarity of target.
Alternatively, all we'd have to do is clean up and bandage the festering wound, and not deliberately cut ourselves with dirty knives again.
I don't think there's been a good case made that the decline of Christianity was an inevitable result of the conditions that we like (democracy, freedom of speech, science, etc.). It seems plausible that instead of going "none of this can be tolerated, get back to your farms, peasant" or "nothing is forbidden, everything is permissible", we could try navigating some sort of middle path, where we introspect on what exactly went wrong, and where, and try keeping as much of the conditions that we like as possible.
> I don't think there's been a good case made that the decline of Christianity was an inevitable result of the conditions that we like (democracy, freedom of speech, science, etc.).
I think that such a case can be made.
On the one hand, science is forever encroaching into the territory of religion. Before science, you had "God created Earth and Man, an placed the Earth at the center of the universe". God (or Satan) is basically the answer for any question where you don't have a good answer. What makes the plants grow? God. Why do the planets move like they do? God wills it.
Once you get science God will lose responsibility for a lot of things which matter to humans. You can still blame him for the Big Bang, but that will only get you as far as Deism. Or you could claim that he interacts with the world, but only in deniable ways.
Regarding freedom of speech, I think that religious uniformity is much easier to achieve when you can burn the heretic on the stake. A few key branches of Christianity evolved as state religions for millennia. Expecting them to do well in a free marketplace of ideas competition is like expecting Khrushchev to win a fair democratic election. In fact, it is amazing that Christianity does as well as it does.
Not at all, you are viewing Christianity through the Augustine lens. Eastern Christianity holds God to be unknowable and incomprehensible hence scientific discoveries are irrelevant to the religion, they are simply human labels and descriptions of things God put in place. To "discover" more of God's creation isn't anything novel, discovering string theory or quantum entanglement is of no more religious value that opening your eyes in the morning and discovering its raining today or your alarm clock didn't go off. If anything science enhances one's wonder of God's creation including the intricacies of the minutiae. Why God created a multiverse or seen the value of having quarks be in two places at once we will never understand but we can appreciate the revealed beauty of it.
That's all cope. Christian intellectuals *used* to think that it was important in understanding the world. It's only once science solved all the mysteries that religion had to stop making falsifiable claims about the world and retreat into the vague wishy-washy stuff we have today.
You are confusing Protestantism with Christianity. Catholicism, in both it's eastern and western forms, has always been pro science when it wasn't be framed by it's adherents (the scientist) as hearsay to disprove God. I will concede certain institutions or individuals were against science occasionally but that was never doctrinal, i.e. just become some Roman Bishop was upset once about gravity doesn't mean anyone else was nor did a new verse in the Bible appear that said "gravity doesn't exist". Now sure it COULD have happened but it didn't; there wasn't a single Euncamical council, the sort of thing that would be required to make your claims a reality, that said "science is bad".
And no Christianity has never retreated into some vague wish-washy stuff we have today, you are once again confusing Protestantism with Christianity. Nor for that matter has scienced solved any mystery of religious import hence like I said, it's irrelevant to Christianity outside increasing our appreciation and marvel of God's revelated truth. And no this isn't a "modern thing", you can go back early Christian theologians, the "fathers" of the church, and they will agree. God and all his creation is something to wonder at, there is nothing that can be discovered which can impugn on that. Maybe go to church sometime and quit being so angry.
My actual position is something along the lines of: science and liberalism and democracy and capitalism all relied on key assumptions that were developed and maintained by Christianity, and so we never needed to develop independent justification for them. As Christianity faded, those assumptions were no longer universally shared, thus undermining science and liberalism and democracy and capitalism, which had never had to stand on their own. And the goal I hope for is to find a new foundation for those assumptions; I'd prefer something independent, but frankly I'm starting to think full-on Christianity is better than the current situation.
The assumptions are, roughly, from off the top of my head: That all humans (perhaps broadly defined) are at some fundamental level equal, and deserving of equal rights, and responsible for equal duties. And that the individual human is the only thing that can be considered to have moral agency and moral standing. That humans are responsible for their own actions. That human rights include things like life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, and that human duties include things like behaving ethically.
And on the one hand, all of this seems basic, but on the other, I don't think any of it is provably true, and I think some might be provably false. And I think we're seeing what happens when these assumptions are questioned, and it's not good.
To expand on what quiet_NaN said, it goes back to Scotts other objection that affirming a falsehood is bad. And unlike what he wrote in this post I don't think that can be waved off as mere aesthetics. Falsehoods and good epistemics are innately hostile to each other. Scott actually wrote about this already in the Parable of Lightning:
"[T]he biggest threat is to epistemology. The idea that everything in the world fits together, that all knowledge is worth having and should be pursued to the bitter end, that if you tell one lie the truth is forever after your enemy – all of this is incompatible with even as stupid a mistruth as switching around thunder and lightning. People trying to make sense of the world will smash their head against the glaring inconsistency...
"The Church didn’t lift a finger against science. It just accidentally created a honeytrap that attracted and destroyed scientifically curious people. And any insistence on a false idea, no matter how harmless and well-intentioned, risks doing the same."
I agree that people shouldn't spread falsehoods. But, and I'm probably not going to put this very well... I'm not sure that this thing we agree would have been developed without building on the evolution of this particular religion, and I'm not sure that it can maintain itself without that foundation. I worry that it's like an early attempt at heavier-than-air flight, where we launch upwards as if from a ski jump, and have been moving upwards without contact with the ground, but now we're in the process of discovering that flapping our arms isn't enough to remain aloft.
In my view it arose much less as an evolution of the positive aspects, than as a reaction against its excesses and failures, especially as expressed in the wars of religion around the Reformation. For most of its existence, Christianity was deeply hostile to liberal values, and while it wears a relatively more gentle face now that's mostly by necessity. We shouldn't be too quick to forget the much more vicious aspects it wore 500 or 1000 years ago, or assume they won't return if given the chance.
Of course the same faults are not predestined to occur, since they did not occur to all Christian sects. Evangelicals, Pentecostals, conservative Catholics and Orthodox, they didn’t modernize and didn’t become woke. They chose a different path: which is why they’re still going strong, while the modernizing mainline churches have been hollowed out.
Not according to the National Survey for Family Growth: American who attend church weekly are above replacement fertility, and have been for the last four decades. Fertility has dropped for those who attend less than weekly (more "nominal" Christians) and the non-religious fertility rate has stayed consistently below replacement rate for the same period of time.
That stat is looking at "Protestants" as a whole: which combines Evangelicals, Fundamentalist, and Pentecostals (the non-modernizing Christians) with Mainline churches like Lutherans, Presbyterians, Anglicans, etc who modernized and have mostly turned woke.
If you seperate them out, you can see that the majority of the decline in religiosity has come from those modernized mainline churches, and not the conservative Christian ones.
"if everyone who was raised evangelical stayed in that tradition, how large would it be? In 1973, about 20 percent of Americans were currently evangelicals, while another 4 percent were former evangelicals. In 2018, those numbers aren’t that much different: 22 percent are currently evangelicals, while another 4 percent were former evangelicals. In essence, defection was basically the same.
"For mainliners in 1973, 28 percent were current adherents while another 7 percent had left the tradition. In 2018, only 11 percent were currently mainline Protestants but another 6 percent had grown up mainline and left. In the most recent data, for every two mainline Protestants, there was another that had left."
They're not "going strong", they lost control. If they had actual control, they would have never let any of this happen. Is Native American culture "going strong" as well, or is it an irrelevant, powerless culture that is doomed to die?
They've only lost control in Western European counties, and are currently in a culture war over America. There are always civilizational ups and downs: after the Muslim conquests, the only Christian countries left were the ignorant backwaters of Western Europe, with all the great centers of Christendom lost. Yet, if you had said that the Muslims had won and the Christians were on their way out, you would have been dead wrong. The situation is not yet so bad as it was back then.
Oh of course, Christianity still has a chance. But they still aren't winning yet. They still need to take power. Nothing less than absolute control will be enough.
In America: globally Christianity is still top dog when it comes to religion, and all signs point to it keeping that position (though those Muslims are at it again and doing their best to catch up).
There is no enemy to fight though. Christianity is not losing its faithful to another religion, but to uninterested agnosticism.
A religion can only survive if it can attract followers and punish apostates. Modern Christianity has little way of doing the former, and cannot legally do the latter.
One of the ways modern culture is obviously maladaptive is below-replacement fertility. Ancients were aware of falling fertility being a problem, and we've preserved quotes from them about it https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/ancient-fertility-quotes but that didn't prevent modern culture from following that path. People have written about the declines of past civilizations from Ibn Khaldun to Edward Gibbon, Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, Glubb Pasha, Joseph Tainter, Jared Diamond etc. This hasn't been enough to get people to take the long view https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/long-views-are-cominghtml Mere memory, or some people having awareness, isn't enough. You need some way to lock in adaptations that won't succumb to cultural drift or "rot". https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/what-makes-stuff-rothtml
Modern rates of unintended pregnancies in the US are ~40%; given the historical absence of prophylactics and abortifacients, I would wager that the majority of humans ever born were not resultant from the desire of parents to maximize the average happiness of their offspring. This is perhaps the paradigmatic example of a super-organism becoming too cerebral, faster than it can adapt other aspects of its character.
I would be very interested to see the weight of variance of teenage pregnancy on life outcomes, controlled for SES. Many aspects are actually strongly hereditary, articulated through seemingly non-hereditary factors; for example, Iceland does not have anywhere near the social dysfunction one would expect with a 2/3 out-of-wedlock birth incidence.
Also, happiness is overweighted, if not outright overrated, as a metric, both descriptively and prescriptively.
Going extinct is obviously maladaptive. If the future consists only of insular cultures which avoid influence from below-replacement cultures (perhaps think of their cultural memes as analogous to pathogens that other cultures protect themselves from), then that's failing to influence the future.
No, but secular people are headed in that direction. Despite an expected gain of 61 million people from religious deconversion, the global percentage of "religiously unaffiliated" people (agnostics, atheists, seculars, etc) is expected to decline from 16.4% of the global population in 2010 to 13.2% in 2050. Unless their fertility rates turn around, there's no reason to expect that trend to change.
"an expected gain of 61 million people" -- globally, by 2100? what is the source of that particular estimate? Curious what the logic is for such a low total looking ahead that far. Unless maybe it's using a really-strict definition of deconversion.
it's possible that a downwards trend to fertility won't continue to extinction, but rather until a new equilibrium, just as predictions of catastrophic population increase 50, 30 years ago failed to come to pass. 1st, 2nd, nth derivatives of population graphs don't necessarily stay constant
How much influence is South Korea going to have when it's a bunch of old people on pensions and a tiny core of overburdened young trying to pay for those pensions? Demographic bulges are fun until they turn upside down.
You can't convert most people in the world because most of the world is low IQ. The high IQ areas are all low fertility.
I don't think low fertility (within reason) is maladaptive at all. I think the world is massively overpopulated, I'd like to see a world in which there were closer to 1 billion or 2 billion people (partly for reasons of sustainability, and mostly to allow all the other species with which we are meant to share the planet to recover their populations), and sub replacement fertility is the only reasonable path to achieve that.
African fertility rates today are the problem, not the solution (though they are making progress too, albeit more slowly than people hoped).
I don't know if I will fully agree with this. First off, the Ayaan Hirsi Alis of this world are not canvassing for Christianity in a vacuum. I'm pretty sure if the only two options were sober liberal atheism and Christianity, most of these intellectuals would and have adopted the former.
No, they are canvassing for Christianity as against Islam which courtesy of demographic change is now a substantial presence in the West. They recognize quite acutely the incompatibility of Islam with western civilization ( it is not too much of an exaggeration to say the latter begins where the former terminates) and want to avert this.
It's a Pascal's wager for the modern era but the prize is the preservation of the west rather than paradise. As with the other Pascal's wager, the implication that people can affect belief is crucial( this is what I consider unlikely).
Second, wokism is really Christianity without the aesthetic and artistic beauty and also without the concept of forgiveness( this is important because there is no one to do the forgiving as there is no God). But all the other elements are there: the concept of original sin, the obsession with the fundamental nature of reality, the morality of guilt, the emphasis on atonement, even its markedly socialist strain, et cetera. Wokism is a distinctly western phenomenon. It will not and cannot arise elsewhere. So to some degree, the pragmatic argument for Christianity bites the dust. It is Christianity, albeit shorn of its better elements, that has gotten the West to this point. What they mistake for the cure actually is responsible for the ailment.
They *say* they want racial divides to fade away. But any time anyone makes actual progress on that, they start stirring up more hatred and division. This is the Shirky Principle in action: people who build their self-image and their livelihood around fighting racism literally cannot afford to get rid of racism.
> I’m sure that is true of some people, but a lot of people are also quite sincere about it.
Yes. Lenin called them "useful idiots." They're the ones who take pretty words at face value rather than looking at outcomes, who never internalized the meaning of the crucially important phrase we were all taught as children, "actions speak louder than words."
> Notice how wokism seemed to gain power dramatically after Trump came on the scene.
I didn't really notice that at all. Resurgent conservatism ("Trumpism") was a backlash against the relentless growth of wokism, slowly creeping and engulfing more and more of the public sphere for decades and then becoming a massive all-encompassing totalitarian blob ever since about 2000. It got *louder* after conservatives started to push back once Trump came on the scene, but it's been noticeably losing a lot of power ever since. For example, could you have even imagined 10 years ago that major corporations would be voluntarily shuttering their Diversity And Equity programs, just for starters?
Thank you for your reply. First, the analogy between Japan and the West lacks weight. Wokeness is more than collective guilt. I listed a set of other features and brevity did not permit mentioning others. Islam and Christianity both have many similarities( monotheisms for one with similar mythologies) and nobody would say they are anywhere close to being identical. Wokeness is a distinctly western phenomenon.
Second, it clearly lacks aesthetic and artistic value. Captain Planet and Power Rangers are not what anyone will consider great works of art or television. Furthermore, Captain Planet debuted in 1990 and Power Rangers in 1993, a full seven years before the new millennium. Most people will agree wokeness is a 21st century ideology. I cannot name five works of art which clearly embody woke ideals and are of significant aesthetic value. I don't think this is a coincidence either. Good art can be ideological but it cannot exist for the sake of ideology. That's just propaganda. Given that wokeness runs so counter to the belief systems of so many, it is likely to be unsuccessful propaganda.
Third, wokeness has no concept of forgiveness because it has no concept of a God. It shares this with other quasi religious belief systems like communism. Where communism emphasizes class and fascism emphasizes ethnicity/nationality, wokeness emphasizes race and sexuality( the others as well but not as muted; this is partly why it has been so convenient for the upper class who have adopted it enthusiastically as race and sexuality do not threaten economic interests).
In all cases, there is a simplified oppressed/oppressor dichotomy used to explain all forms of socioeconomic relations. The oppressor can either be eliminated or he can be reformed. But he cannot be forgiven largely because he is guilty of something which he cannot change ( race, ethnicity, class, etc) and will always be guilty of. That is why ideologies like these often end up supporting or instigating genocide because it is the logical conclusion of such a mindset.
If people want to see racial prejudices disappear, and I argue they never will because racists on all sides will always exist as it's fundamental human nature, the best approach is to return to what we had in the nineties where there was a genuine attempt to construct a post racial society. Prejudice will always be with us but it doesn't mean progress cannot be made. Wokeness has not offered that progress as it's fundamentally uninterested in that anyway. It has only exacerbated political, ethnic, and racial division. Perhaps, with people tiring of it, we can begin to afford better solutions.
I think we have fundamental agreement on going back to the culture and zeitgeist of the 90s - 2000s, ( although I don't think this will happen). I also think you have a good natured approach towards wokeness which I will concede certainly exists in certain quarters.
Our disagreements pertain to all the other points but I suppose those have been made quite clear by now.
One final assertion though: although race isn't fundamental to human nature, racism is. By which I mean it's not so much that race is an important classifier of human beings( although since David Reich's landmark work on human genetics and anthropology, I've been less inclined to call it arbitrary), but more so that people will consciously try to divide and organize themselves across certain characteristics. Discrimination is intrinsic to human experience. Since the concept of race, especially through the filter of skin colour is so salient, it's an obvious category for this. This is what I mean when I say it will never go away.
It seems to me Wokeness replaces the concept of forgiveness with the concept of tribalism, which is a regression in societal philosophy. "My tribe comes first, especially compared to a tribe that wronged us in the past". Christianity was always supposed to be about crossing tribal lines, from Jesus talking to the Samaritan woman at the well to Peter getting the vision prompting him to take the gospel to the uncircumsized. The veneer of original sin and such is new, but without Christianity you would still have tribalism, there would just be under a different skin.
This says more about the forgiveness of the Polish people compared to Korea, which is absolutely impossible to please on this matter.
You can't count the number of apologies in the history section -- I gave up counting by the mid 90s, when the apology rate reaches three per year, but the number of apologies addressed at Korea directly is easily double digits -- and then consider that by 2010 a quarter of Koreans believed Japan *never apologised*!
Can you point to where they've done so on record? My understanding is that Japan has refused to admit the abuses visited on Korea specifically, while Germany has denied nothing.
The rapid and overt forgiveness of the Polish people was a way to avoid a conversation about their own manifested expression of their lives of Jews and Ukrainians during the 1940s, i.e. "move in here, nothing to see, we forgive the Germans and Russians"
Your second bit was going to be my comment if no one else said it. The core of wokeness is obsession with and elevation of victimhood. That only happened because of Western Christianity. Arguing for Christianity as a bulwark against the kind of society that produces wokeness gets the problem backwards.
Christ was not a victim in the contemporary sense of a person who gets hurt on account of their powerlessness, but absolutely a victim in the sense of the Latin *victima*, a living sacrificial offering. In Catholic liturgy Christ is repeatedly described this way, indeed as a "holy, pure and immaculate victim".
Wokeness and Christianity both elevate victimhood, but in very very different ways, and those ways are the bulwark.
Wokeness treats victimhood as a Marxist class, and uses it as part of a historical struggle of the righteous against the oppressors. It's a fundamentally collectivist notion, that justifies and excuses cruelty by the victim.
Christianity treats suffering as a component of personal virtue. I'm not an expert, but I think it has something to do with relieving others' suffering by taking it onto yourself. It's a fundamentally individual notion, that encourages forgiveness of others and a strict accounting for ones' own actions.
I agree with forgiveness of others but my interpretation of Christianity is that it also encourages you to forgive yourself (Jesus forgives you - he has already paid for your sins)
The experience of pain can be transformed into joy when we reflect that it brings us closer to Christ the redeemer who experienced so much pain on the cross
> my interpretation of Christianity is that it also encourages you to forgive yourself
I kinda agree, but I personally wouldn't have put it like that because of local issues. In America we sometimes run into some evangelical or fundamentalist Calvinist types, and their unknowing spiritual descendants in secular therapy, who IMHO take this too far, and use it as a solipsistic excuse to get away with all sorts of stuff. But that's more of a personal annoyance that I haven't gotten past (yet, I hope).
What is it about Eastern Christianity that insulates it from wokeness? I have some speculation but I would be interested in hearing your thoughts.
If anything, I would say that wokeness is Calvinist. Calvinism, of course, is form of Western Christianity, but it's not all of Western Christianity, or even close to a plurality of it
Basically though it's the fact it's non-Roman (legalese) but Hellenistic (mystery). The true religion of the West is process and Augustine married western Christianity to it until death of western Christianity will it part.
I'm not going to lie, I get all those old Roman A's mixed up. It's the one that basically argued God is a lawyer which became the bedrock of the Western Church. It wasn't Aquinas as he was after the split though he did cement it.
Any conversation about the history of concepts around "victimhood" must include the history of "rights". As far as a brief search reveals, J.S. mill proclaimed a skeptic's stance.
Thanks for the interesting comments! Here's my take:
1) Ayaan is a convert to genuine Christianity. As I understand her story, she was depressed and suicidal in her atheistic worldview, tired every scientific remedy, and was finally saved (resurrected, born again) when she prayed to Jesus. She talks about cultural Christianity to point out that it's wrong to treat all religions the same (in particular putting Christianity and Islam together in the same basket), and because it points secular humanists to actual Christianity, which she found to be lifesaving.
2) While there may be some superficial similarities, I see wokism as being fundamentally opposed to the message of Jesus. Wokism is centered around dividing and accusing.
In the Bible, Satan is literally 'the accuser' and Diabolos literally means 'divider' or 'scatterer'. The gospels portray Jesus's religious opponents as the ones who were doing the accusing. The Pharisees judged themselves better than tax collectors and prostitutes. The chief priest, Caiaphas, accused Jesus and had him crucified. Jesus, instead, desired reconciliation through forgiveness ("forgive our sins as we forgive those who sin against us") and self-accusation ("take the plank out of your eye before you attempt the speck in your neighbors").
Jesus was a victim, but he didn't handle it in the woke manner. He didn't call for reparations, nor incite his followers to avenge him, nor ask the Jews to defund the Romans ("give to Caesar what is Caesar's"). Instead, on the cross, after being accused, betrayed, humiliated, tortured, and wrongfully sentenced to death, he uttered "Father forgive them, they know not what they're doing."
The impression I get about wokism is that it's an ever-hungry accusation machine. It devours everyone from long-dead slaveholders to celebrities who make a single politically incorrect joke. And forgives no one.
Hello, David. Thank you for the warm reply. I appreciate it.
I can't speak to the genuineness of Ayaan's conversion. It's a matter between her and God. We may, with some humility, interpret it as a response to the trauma of her Muslim youth and she's right of course to point out the fundamental differences in morality between Christianity and Islam, a distinction those in the west often fail to realize to their own detriment.
I also agree with you that at the end wokeness and Christianity are in conflict primarily because Christianity's central message is forgiveness through Christ and the offer of eternal redemption while wokeness, as I've already pointed out, operates without the possibility of forgiveness.
However, the similarities, from where I'm standing, are much deeper than superficial but I guess that would take a longer reply to fully articulate. Have a good one.
I suppose by spotlighting victims, wokism is closer to Jesus than, say, SPQR or what I know about Hinduism. And I am curious to hear more about the deep similarities you've found, if you have the time to explain them.
Kind regards,
David
PS To me, the NT also seems pretty anti-woke in its communion of all believers regardless of class, gender, or ethnicity. ("There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.")
I will try to articulate the many and deep similarities between Christianity and wokism. This might take a little while.
Wokism is more than just accusing and dividing others. It's a fine start but any religion or ideology can and has done that. Wokism has a set of attributes I've already listed but I will take them apart one by one to show how it connects to Christianity. In many ways, wokeism is Christianity's bastard offspring.
First off, wokeism is the understanding of historical and socioeconomic relations through the application of an oppressor-oppressed matrix centered primarily around gender, sexuality and race. In this way, it borrows from Marxist socialism but where Marxism's fundamental unit of analysis employs class struggle, wokeism is centered on race and gender struggle ( Many old school and classic Marxists don't like wokeism for that reason since they regard it and social justice warriors as a distraction from the important issue of class warfare).
But other than changing the centre of emphasis, the rest is largely similar. The oppressor exploits the oppressed and there can be no true negotiation between them because there's a power imbalance. The only resolution is extensive reparations. Note that unlike Marxism where the focus is the violent redistribution of material resources, wokeism wants this too but since it's more concerned with gender and race struggle, what it is after more specifically is the redistribution of status and representation( hence, why they are obsessed with changing traditionally heterosexual or white characters into other races and sexualities or flying pride flags across important seats of power). Note that both ideologies operate with a zero sum mindset: there's a fixed amount of wealth or status in this world, the oppressor class has historically hoarded it, and it is now time to redistribute it to the oppressed without consent.
Now, for the similarities with Christianity.
First off, Christianity has always been deeply sympathetic to socialism. Jesus has many messages condemning wealth, the early disciples lived in communal settlements where they shared everything equally. Indeed, over the centuries, many christian cults and sects such as the Arborites, Albigenses, the Society of the Free Spirit, and many more have preached a socialist paradise of sorts where all property is publicly owned, the family ceases to exist, and there is no distinction between thine and mine. One of the earliest works of socialist philosophy, More's Utopia, is heavily influenced by christian doctrine. For a longer, more thorough analysis, consult the first few chapters of Russian mathematician and philosopher Igor Shafarevich's landmark work on communism.
Indeed, it is in part Christianity's attitude towards usury and wealth that allowed social outcasts such as the Jews take up these roles in society and grow wealthy as a result. They were often resented by the christian communities for that reason, a resentment that ironically carried over into Marxism, famously in the anti semitic The Jewish Question, given that Marx himself was also a Jew. There is thus an interesting and deep connection between Socialism, Marxism, Christianity, and Wokeism, although all four are distinct from each other.
Second, the redistribution of status Wokeism is so concerned about finds parallels and antecedent in Christ's sermon on the mouth, an historical break with pre christian ideology where as Nietzsche often noted, the virtues of strength were extolled and the virtues of weakness such as humility, et cetera, were denigrated. Christianity is the first or at least most thorough to apply this inversion and instead assert that it is the meek, the poor, the needy, and so on who shall inherit the kingdom of God. Indeed, the tension between these two kinds of morality was discussed recently on this substack where Andrew Tate was cited somewhat misleadingly as an example of the Nietzschean ideal. Wokeism goes even further: The gay person but even beyond that, the trans person must receive more status than the heterosexual, the disabled must receive more status than the able-bodied ( it's no wonder that more people are claiming all kinds of disabilities now), minorities before whites, so on. In this moral framework, you are more moral based on how powerless you seem and how little harm you have done historically. You accord yourself status as an ally by cutting yourself down to size and shrinking yourself in support of those who have historically been mistreated( I don't even disagree on the premise here; I just think wokeism isn't the solution).
Third, consider how in Islam, the classical split between Sunni and Shia is over Muhammad's legitimate successor. It is essentially a power struggle, no different from a political succession. But in Christianity, the classical split between Catholic and Orthodox is philosophical, over the godhead of the Trinity. Christianity's fundamental split was over the nature of reality. I am straining here but I find similar echoes in today's pointless wrangling over gender and sexuality. The absurdity of such debates as how many angels can dance on the head of a pin is similar to the modern absurdity of how many genders there are, et cetera. You will find no similar philosophical conflicts in Islam or Judaism.
Fourth, I think it's certainly interesting that while there have of course been christians who have been terrorists eg the Irish terrorists during the troubles, there have been very few terrorists who performed their acts of terrorism in the name of Christ or Christianity. The Irish terrorists were embroiled in a political struggle over independence and their terrorism followed from this.
Contrast with Islam where terrorists often commit these ghastly actions in the name of religion and regard themselves as entitled to a divine reward for blowing themselves up.
However, Christianity has often featured witch-hunts to a scale and a degree unseen in other religions. Witch-hunts are interesting because those being punished are ostensibly christian but merely of a different faith and they are not wars as such but communal spasms of violence or ostracism which can be just as damaging( Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter is a memorable example).
Although a lot less severe, there is something to be said about how cancel culture often targets heretics for being just slightly out of line by fundamentally ostracizing them. It is, in my opinion, one of the darker attributes of Christianity which has of course survived into wokeism.
There are other similarities, of course. The fundamental differences, however, make Christianity a much more rewarding and wholesome ideology primarily because Christianity is at its heart, individualistic while wokeism is collectivist and Christianity always extends the possibility of redemption and forgiveness, at the very least as an ideal. Last but not least, wokeism is religious in character but not a religion while Christianity is a religion.
My thoughts on the subject are rather scattered and unpolished but those are my observations on the subject. If you have indulged me so far, thank you. Have a lovely one.
Thanks so much for taking the time to explain all of this. Your connections are impressive, and I don't see anything that I overtly disagree with. Just three thoughts from my point of view:
1) I personally draw a bright line between Jesus's ministry and historical Christianity. Christianity is filled with immoral hypocrisy, and I agree that The Scarlet Letter and witch hunts and inquisitions are certainly a part of Christian history, but I don't read any legitimate justification for that behavior in the gospels. To me, it's important to separate Christ's ideal from what the screwed-up sinners did who claimed to follow him. Jesus gave us the highest morality humanity has ever considered, and part of his assessment is that humans are screw-ups and will always screw up.
2) As for Christianity and Marxism, I'd say that any good idea can become evil through coercion. I am pleased to see people being baptized... but I'd be horrified to witness it done by the sword the way Olaf Trygvesson did it.
Similarly, a few dozen people pooling their wealth and living communally to serve the poor is far different from assassinating the tsars and exterminating the kulaks. ("I am not Christ or a philanthropist, old lady, I am all the contrary of a Christ... I fight for the things I believe in, with all the weapons at my disposal and try to leave the other man dead so that I don't get nailed to a cross or any other place." —Che Guevera)
3) I agree that ostracizing just-slightly-out-of-line believers is a dark attribute of Christianity, but again, I don't see that grounded in Jesus's ministry. On the contrary, Jesus said "he that is not against us is for us." In the gospels (and Acts), it was the Jewish Pharisees and Sadducees who were wrangling over minor points of interpretation. Freud observed this as a universal social phenomenon and coined the term "narcissism of small differences".
Thanks again for sharing your thoughts! I wasn't familiar with Shafarevich and he seems very interesting!
> No, they are canvassing for Christianity as against Islam which courtesy of demographic change is now a substantial presence in the West.
And yet we motor along quite well together. The hysteria about Islam is in direct opposition to the power of Islamic countries who are getting pulverised by the west every 5 years or so.
Ayaan Hirsi Alis is part of that neo con cabal who want to fight Islamists by bombing or overthrowing secular leaders in the Middle East and North Africa, thus creating vacuums for Islamist movements to grow. You would think that would work only once, but it works every time.
Like Scott, I have no sympathy for "cultural Christianity," as described.
Many have claimed that the seeds of whatever-we-have-now lie, not in the loss of Christianity, but in Christianity itself. Nietzsche, hostile to Christianity, did so in On the Genealogy of Morality. Voegelin, friendly to Christianity, did so in The New Science of Politics. (Voegelin, and others like him, qualify this claim by saying it is heretical variants of Christianity that are at fault, not the orthodox kind.)
Whatever the details, I think it is a powerful observation that we did indeed try Christianity –– and got to exactly where we are. In order plausibly to make the argument that Christianity is the solution, one needs an additional account of what we'd need to do differently this time.
If no one tried it in 2000 years of theistic rule, I'm happy to infer that human's won't try it again even if we bend our society towards trying to make them do it.
If I look into some "productivity" software, and it turns out to be difficult enough to use that productivity is not improved as a result, the software has in fact been found wanting.
That is the strange predicament of history. All people could love their neighbor as themselves, and if we did, society would become incredibly productive. Think about all the waste involved with making sure people can be trusted, contacts are honored, the truth is being told, software isn't malicious, etc.
Iron could come out of the ground as conveniently-sized sheets and ingots rather than ore, which would save a tremendous amount of waste involved with crushing, smelting, forging... but, empirically speaking, it doesn't.
Ideal oracles could solve any (and thus, every) NP-complete problem as fast as an RNG can write down the answer. If somebody has such an oracle, they must be doing a heck of a job keeping it quiet.
Fig trees could bear fruit out of season, lions could lay down with lambs, and software could turn out bug-free on the first draft, if God willed it so. Apparently He has other plans, thus we need to do some things the hard way. http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/tasks-at-hand
Sorry, I don't follow your point here. It is possible for each of us to love our neighbors. Are you suggesting the reason we aren't doing that has something to do with the way iron is found in ores or other features of the natural world?
Indeed I am. Boiling it down to one word, the problem is "entropy." Humans are not all the same, and we can't even precisely measure many of the most relevant differences. Coordination requires accommodating and/or overcoming those differences.
If someone intends to love their neighbor as themselves, but they don't know the back of their neighbor's hand as well as they know their own hand, are they actually, truly and effectively, loving their neighbor? Or are they loving the inaccurate image of their neighbor (with a slightly different hand, and whatever else) which exists only in their own mind?
They might, for example, knit a glove which perfectly fits a hand-shape they imagined their neighbor having, but is uncomfortable, possibly even injurious, when worn by the actual hand for which it was intended.
I personally draw a bright line between Jesus's ministry (the "Christian ideal") and historical Christianity. Christianity is filled with immoral hypocrisy, and I agree that crusades, indulgences, witch hunts, and inquisitions are certainly a part of Christian history, but I don't read any legitimate justification for that behavior in the gospels. To me, it's important to separate Christ's ideal from what the screwed-up sinners did who claimed to follow him. Jesus gave us the highest morality humanity has ever considered.
That Christianity wasn't able to keep from decaying into bad-things-are-good is an important consideration. When we think of all the good things of the 1950's, we have to remember that it immediately decayed into the 60's.
The hope of cultural Christianity would be that we could do better the second time round. As for sincerity, it is not necessary to perjure yourself, just to encourage Christianity. Benjamin Franklin donated whenever a church was being built, I think, even though he didn't belong to any of them. Jordan Peterson has been saying lots of nice things about Christianity even though he can't seem to bring himself to believe it as fact.
Scott's second argument, and the argument of many comments here, is that Christianity didn't prevent wokeness and therefore it can't prevent wokeness.
Although I'm comfortable calling religion a technology, Christianity isn't a set-and-forget civilization-maximizer. It's a set of values and claims that require personal commitment. The argument for cultural Christianity is that it works to sustain civilization when a sufficient number of people make that commitment. We now have our lesson, and the next time around we should be teaching the lesson of what happens when you don't make that commitment.
I think the real argument is actually the one Scott says he isn't interested in talking about here. I think Scott could accept your argument that we should push for more of this Christian Technology, except that he doesn't personally believe it and doesn't like lying about his beliefs.
Low, crime, high trust. Women and children could walk on the streets without fear. People got married and stayed married. The elite was educated. People knew their neighbors.
How much of what changed can be traced straight back to real estate speculation?
If housing is selected primarily based on eventual resale value, could turn out that the only thing you have in common with your neighbors is how they were able to do the same basic math and could afford a similar mortgage. http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/moral-dilemmas
The iconic uneducated elite is "Teflon" Don Trump, who got his money mostly from the real estate market despite not being a particularly competent businessman.
Inability to afford a house makes it harder to credibly commit to building a family, which seems like it could plausibly have some sort of impact on marital stability.
Crime and unsafe streets are particularly associated with inner-city slums, which result from landlords buying up real estate with obvious potential value (thanks to its proximity to the rest of the city), then letting buildings decay (to minimize expenses, both in maintenance and property tax), and vaguely hoping to someday resell to someone with a plan for converting it to actual value.
I am not sure one can make the argument that humans changed so much. What did change is technology and economics. The problem is not bad people. Few people really have power. How much power does a shareholder have over what their corporations are doing? Corporations are maximizing profit (that is why people own shares). If a human person would only think of maximizing profit, we would call them sociopathic. So not bad people, but sociopathic organizations are the problem.
I cant see what that would have to do with Christianity.
Agreed, I think modern capitalism (plus historical memory holing of what was bad in the past) explains everything Scott objects to about the present much better than any cultural/religious axis.
One of the more under looked and I think worthwhile angles here. People who are intellectually inclined like to explain things in terms of ideas, but... "People were persuaded by bad ideas so things are bad; we just need to convince them of the right idea and then things will be good" is I think too facile an explanation of long-term historical trends. "Ideology as superstructure" is an oversimplification in the other direction, but... The modern sexual landscape, for example, I think owes more to the pill and the washing machine and other technological --> economic changes (more demand for jobs requiring communication than brute strength/endurance etc) than a few feminist agitators and authors and/or loss of faith.
Christianity seems like a more accurate depiction of reality than the one that preceded it, where you went to the temple and made sacrifices and the gods would battle it out on your behalf, or you would see something in a dream and that meant you should kill your friend/switch jobs/change your will.
Likewise Protestant christianity seems like a more accurate depiction than Catholicism where priests have special access to the divine and indulgences work.
Both of these "level ups" have beneficial effects on how people live their everyday life, and how society functions. When people convert to Christianity they spend less time and energy on sacrifices and look elsewhere for advice.
Likewise, what we have now is more accurate than christianity. It's not that great, but no consensus reality in history has been. They take a noisy path but generally progress in the right direction.
You can rest assured that the consensus reality you dislike will also progress towards truth.
exactly. Christianity was uniquely good for its time in comparison to the alternatives available. But we evolved out of it since.
I think of Christianity like some sort of our cultural grandma. Loved, but old-fashioned, wise, but a lot of things she says just no longer hold up. And that's okay.
This isn't my area of expertise (being wrong on the internet is), but the assertion that the 1880s to the 1930s "wasn't very religious" is very strange to me. Some German weirdo saying "God is Dead" didn't really have much effect on the widespread religious practices of the American populace. The whole temperance movement was essentially rooted in Protestant churches, which were also enjoying a major boom during that time. Perhaps you could say that the rarefied heights of the artistic and intellectual world were more atheistic, but I'd still be somewhat skeptical of that claim...
Nietzsche was a weirdo, but he observed the contemporary trend *in Europe*, which pretty clearly went towards secular nationalism, especially in the most important countries (Germany, Italy, France, England).
As usually, statements like that only have regional validity. Even in Nietzsche's Europe, the Poles and the Irish were very religious. But his assessment was that these pockets wouldn't matter in the big picture, and he was right.
Interesting read. That is not how I have interpreted cultural Christianity. I hear the term and think of a person who lives mostly accepting the basic norms of Christianity and subsequent structure of society based on those norms, while not accepting the claims of universal truth, miracles and the divinity of Christ.
Same here, or more so — I'm familiar with "cultural Christianity" meaning stuff like wanting a day off on 25th December. I don't think anyone is arguing that social values and norms are deeply shaped by those trappings. I hadn't heard the usage that Scott is talking about.
People are using this term in different ways. I think we need a taxonomy here, so I hereby declare there to be four varieties of cultural Christian:
1) The Pragmatic Cultural Christian. A Christian of convenience who wants a day off at Christmas, wants an excuse to gorge on chocolate at Easter, and may pretend to be Christian to join a better or more convenient public school (quite common in England).
2) The Aesthetic Cultural Christian. Someone who feels some genuine attachment to the art, architecture, music, and rituals of Christianity, or enjoys the community of church. They may also feel a sense of cultural heritage, but probably doesn't have any stronger beliefs about the virtues of the Christian doctrine. (This, to me, is the "purest" cultural Christian.)
3) The "Personal Virtue" Cultural Christian. Someone who, despite not actually believing in the supernatural stuff, thinks that Christianity cultivates virtues that we should try to follow and teach to our children, but doesn't try to expand this to society at large. (This seemed the mainstream in my (English village) upbringing.)
4) The Civilizational Cultural Christian. Someone who makes macro-level intellectual arguments about how society needs the uniting civilisational virtues of Christianity that keep society functioning, and in order to fight the onslaught of Islam, hedonism, nihilism, fertilty collapse etc. (This is probably the rarest in "real life", but the most common in post-rationalist blogging circles).
If #4 is the rarest, perhaps that's because it's dependent on #3. If civilization is going to unite around Christianity to fight those enemies, there needs to be buy-in on the individual level. And I don't think that simply liking architecture or music is going to be enough motivation to stand up to these foes. Someone might like a beautiful building or classical music but that preference is no match when academe comes along saying that ionian columns are phallic and Mozart was racist.
Interesting. This very well may be correct. I am curious about #1, as i am unsure why that would have an impact on public school eligibility. I am in the US, so I am unfamiliar with the scenario.
I was a #2, but did not consider myself a cultural Christian, but a non-militant atheist. I just felt an affinity to the familiar experiences of my childhood in a very religious, Christian home.
Upon having kids, I shifted to #3, and would in fact consider myself a cultural Christian.
I never considered those as two points on the same spectrum, but can see how they may be a sliding scale.
My friend lives near to a small, good quality, in-demand Church of England village school, which his kids can walk to (potentially saving him hundreds of hours of school-runs over the next decade). The school has multiple criteria by which they select attendees, one of which is being a member of the local church. Because it's 2024, almost no-one under the age of 70 is actually a committed Church of England Christian, but it's a very good trade-off to pretend to be for a couple of years before your first child enters school. Somewhat ironically, my friend who I would actually consider a type #3/#4 cultural Christian, didn't do this, because he thought it was dishonest, and almost failed to get his daughter into the school.
Actually #1 is common in the US among middle class parents who want their kids to go to Roman Catholic primary schools but don't want to pay non-member rates; likewise those who attend nominal religious universities like Notre Dame or Marquette. Even with mandatory tithing you still come out ahead given the deep discounts members get.
That I understand, having attended a private religious university. It is the inclusion of public school that lost me. It seems to have been addressed, above, although my ignorance regarding the public school system in England is obvious!
You're working off a sample size of 1 here. Christian culture collapsed into postmodernism one time, the only time we've had, largely because it was confronted by unprecedented challenges and didn't see them coming. That's no rational basis for proclaiming that it would inevitably happen again.
If you don't like the west (or never did), then no.
Christianity was an essential part of western history for a long time, so if I argue that it played a role in how we are or were, that has a lot of prima facie validity, regardless of what you think.
If you look at India and think that that's actually a much better goal, then knock yourself out.
How do you know that it's the result of a specific religion that just takes thousands of years to develop, as opposed to just randomness or some other factor?
Vegetarianism is a lot more popular in Hinduism. So should we copy some aspect of that? Maybe that people can reincarnate into animals. Or do it like with Christianity. If banning gay sex means that 2000 years later gay marriage is accepted, maybe we need to ban vegetarian diets.
If five different loaves of bread and two different fish all succumb to the same strain of mold when left out on the kitchen counter overnight, I'm gonna want to see some actual evidence of novel mold resistance before accepting any claim that a truckload of more-of-the-same won't.
False analogy. We're not dealing with inanimate objects here; we're dealing with people who can learn, and groups of people that can adapt through communication and tradition.
The very fact we're dealing with groups means "christian culture" didn't only collapse "one time." Group members were affected individually, following peer pressure or opportunistic curiosity or personal conscience just like the spread of any previous heresy, yet consistently enough for a broad pattern to become clear. No single raindrop defines the river, no single pebble the avalanche. The race goes not always to the swift, nor battle to the strong, but that's usually the way to bet.
Yes, but the same is true of liberal culture, so the Cultural Christianity Argument (that liberalism inevitably fails at this task compared to Christianity) hasn't yet been supported.
Scott, liberalism *is* Cultural Christianity. That's its most definitive characteristic: the search for the blessings valued as "good" by Christian culture through mechanical means, without paying the price of Christian virtue traditionally required in order to obtain them.
The ills identified are so miniscule, and the modern world has delivered so many riches and freedoms to so many people, this is a bizarre "through the looking glass" analysis. What fall, what decadence? Or am I going crazy? "wokeness" and corporate dei is a threat to civilization?? Have you lost all sense of proportion??
Most court reporters in the US don't even understand African American English, which, given that they're arrested far out of proportion to the rest of the population, is an insane notion to me. They literally have one job. But no, *wokeness* is the thing we should focus on right now.
Wokeness and DEI are antithetical to the conditions that built the "riches and freedoms" that you love in the modern world. Consider the fact that 2/3 of 4th-graders in America are illiterate. Wokeness did that. How are we going to make the next generation of technological breakthroughs if we don't educate our children to even the most basic of standards?
"US scores in both math and reading have been trending up for decades"
Having lived in a Late Stage Communist country, impressive statistics mean nothing. On paper, we were a major industrial power, producing shittons of steel etc. In practice, people would queue for coveted goods such as washing machines, if they had a chance to get them.
"yet we do far more innovation than any other OECD country"
This is a stronger argument, but how much of that innovation is done by the adult immigrants whom you mention, and who weren't exposed to the farce of the US public school system in their youth?
The Board defined three achievement levels for each grade:
* NAEP Basic denotes partial mastery of the knowledge and skills that are fundamental for proficient work at a given grade.
* NAEP Proficient represents solid academic performance for the given grade level and competency over challenging subject matter including subject-matter knowledge, application of such knowledge to real world situations, and analytical skills appropriate to the subject matter.
* NAEP Advanced presumes mastery of both the NAEP Basic and NAEP Proficient levels and represents superior academic performance.
-----
So only 32% (slightly below 1/3) of 4th graders demonstrate reading proficiency beyond the bare basics. About halfway down the first page, you find a setting that says "Baseline". Clicking on "NAEP Basic" shows that across the nation, only 61% meet even the bare-minimum level. And honestly, that's simply pathetic. Anything below 90% for both levels constitutes a massive failure of the system.
> only a tiny percentage of the population are doing technological breakthroughs
Which just makes quality education for the masses all the more crucial. If it's a numbers game, you need to start from the highest baseline you can!
> Barriers to immigration of top talent is a far bigger barrier to innovation than anything from DEI or wokeness, and wokeness could be a net benefit to innovation if it removes those immigration barriers and makes the US a more attractive destination for top talent from other countries.
Yes, wokeness could be a benefit if it worked completely different from the way wokeness works. But then it wouldn't be wokeness anymore. It does not concern itself with attracting top talent, but rather, under a guise of egalitarianism and fairness, it does the opposite, calling you a bad person if you would prefer to privilege the top talent rather than indiscriminately letting in anyone who wants to be here even if they're utter human scum.
Honestly, with UIs growing more sophisticated and story elements pervading games more and more universally as the hardware limitations that once kept them largely confined to the RPG genre fade into irrelevance, I'd expect the exact opposite: it's getting harder and harder to find games that are possible to play without being able to read.
This is more than countered by the increased total number of games. Take something like Minecraft for example, I've seen it played with little difficulty by someone who barely knows how to read. He just comes up with his own names for the items instead of reading what they are called.
Set aside wokeness, the most obvious way modern culture is maladaptive is fertility falling below replacement levels. Robin Hanson made a series of posts on the issue (though it's really a sub-issue of maladaptive cultural drift) relatively recently and you can find many of them collected here https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/my-fertility-posts
Why say "set aside wokeness" and then talk about a great harm that was caused by wokeness? (They called it "political correctness" at the time, because they're constantly changing their names for themselves, but it's the same thing.)
Not everything is about the US. Fertility has gone down in places like Tehran, Belgrade and Jakarta, all fairly distant from the US culture wars and having very different culture wars on their own.
In fact, the strongest correlation between total fertility and something social that you can get, is whether girls get education until the age of 15 or so. Once they do, regardless of the country, their total TFR drops to less than a half of their illiterate peers. All the other steps (with regard to total education achieved) are much less steep.
I agree! And also, the idea that our time has fallen from an imagined better past is as old as it gets. Every age feels that way. It's only an illusion that life in 1890 had anything over on us today (asthetics included). In fact, it's patently ridiculous, the world is SO much better now than then. Whatever the merits of Christianity, cultural or otherwise, it has nothing to do with our feeling of loss. Thus it's ever been.
I’d agree with most of that except the aesthetics, which is clearly rubbish. Medieval peasants could build better architecture, abs the renaissance produced greater art. TV is better now though.
Do you imagine that advocating for Cultural Christianity means that we must also advocate for the elimination of indoor plumbing? Are you assigning the development of every helpful technology to the rejection of Christianity?
Don't worry: in a restored Christian monarchy you'll still be able to take antibiotics.
Please advocate for whatever religion or cultural norms you like. Characterizing today's world as fallen or decadent is specious. I would take 2024 over 1890 in absolutely every way.
Here you demonstrate that your above comment was a giant motte-and-bailey, where the motte is that technology (which nobody's proposing to reverse) and basic democracy (that predated the decline of Christianity) are better now than in the past...and the bailey is that now is better "in absolutely every way" than the past.
The former is obviously true but irrelevant, as nobody's arguing against it. The latter is a pure assertion that you've provided no argument for at all (and no engagement with the long list of bad things about the present that have been listed in many of the comments).
I'd submit that both motte and bailey are "everything is indeed better" and I hope you allow a little rhetorical flourish when I say "everything". Nearly, overwhelmingly, everything.
Not just technology and basic democracy.
The thrust of the article was anti-modernity and how we have descended into wokeness and decadence. Having reread it I'm yet more struck by how weak the rationale for overturning or returning to some earlier order is.
There's been a lot of obvious problems with modernity mentioned, including crime rates, family breakdowns, children never born to committed families to begin with, below-replacement fertility, level of social trust, state of modern art and architecture, state of mental health and happiness in the population, and so on. Plus more debatable things like declining education level (it seems to me more people are going through school, but school is doing a far worse job on average for them, but I could be wrong). Could you list the counterveiling objective benefits of the present not related to technology or the existence of a liberal democracy?
(By objective I mean things like I tried to list above that near-everyone agrees are bad or good. So not things like maximal sexual freedom or too much guilt over slavery which they obviously don't.)
And then we might make some progress on this debate.
Crime records in England going back to 1200. They are meticulous with record keeping. And also a broader analysis across other European countries. Look at chart after chart and trend after trend. Never in that recorded time have we had it as good as now. Unless you are referring to high crime in Sudan in the present time. In which case they are already neck deep in orthodoxy and tradition so you need some other solution for the civil war.
They are way up, so is single parent-hood. Lower stigma attached to this plus fall in "shotgun" marriages. You may think access to contraception and abortion is a net negative. I think it's a net positive, which does mean there are real costs but we are still better off because we can provide public support to poor children, EITC, etc. with greater freedoms. And personally, I would much prefer this world for my daughter than one of shame, ostracism, and abandonment.
May I suggest that the author and many commenters may be experiencing "declinism" -- viewing the past more favorably than the present due to cognitive biases. We all mistakenly think our childhood was a time of "simplicity" and "order" and "care freeness". Or that there was a golden age in some past time, and if only we could return to those norms, glory will be ours.
Yeah. The world has never been better, and that's held true for the longest time (it annoyed me that Covid put a brief dent in it and for a couple of years you could reasonably reply "well, 2019", to the question "when has the world ever been better?")
"Space travel nonsense" has the possibility of returning to an era of lots of cultures undergoing cultural selection. Global monoculture has less selective pressure https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/how-fix-cultural-drift
I'm sorry, but this is all a load of crap. Almost every sentence in this comment is incorrect.
The one example of the Sinosphere is enough to disprove your claims about culture. The Chinese empires were no more death cultures than the Roman, built through conquest, yes, but does not involve human sacrifice. Go back further, and you will find that human sacrifice is present throughout the entire world.
Furthermore, while it often isn't presented that way, the Chinese used to practice a form of pantheism as well, with deities like 土地公 ("lord of the land") and the planet Jupiter.
I assumed that I did not have to include the achievements of the Chinese, but in case you didn't know, these included the compass, paper, gunpowder, movable type printing, banknotes, and the spork.
The phrase "the Copenhagen experiment" has no referent, but I gather what you are referring to is the Copenhagen *interpretation* of quantum mechanics, which is semantically empty and has since been superseded by sensible physics like "taking the equations at face value", also known, for better or for worse, the many-worlds interpretation.
You also don't seem to realise the extreme irony of claiming that quantum mechanics is erroneous while using a device that quantum mechanics was essential in making possible to spread this drivel. Yet another irony is that you could've claimed quantum mechanics had a hand in almost anything and be correct, but you picked the one idea whose conception quantum mechanics had no hand in: the Big Bang. That was all general relativity, the one area quantum mechanics has failed and is still failing to subsume. Despite later elaboration using ideas from quantum mechanics, it was discovered by one person applying the entirely classical Einstein field equations to the universe as a whole.
And as for the claim that Oppenheimer was a third-rate scientist, well, his equations are still torturing physics graduate students to this day.
I assumed that I did not have to include the achievements of the Chinese, but in case you didn't know, these included the compass, paper, gunpowder, movable type printing, banknotes, and the spork.
Sporks, aside (which isn’t true as far as I can see) , that’s not great for thousands of years - at least two were independently found in Europe, and Europeans plainly used gun powder to greater effect.
OP was claiming that "African cultures, prob due to their pantheism, were tribes n never grew anything permanent to mans improvement [sIc]", and that all other cultures "who were great engineers via the pyramids- were death cultures- Aztec had human sacrifice- [sIc]". My comment was a response to those clearly absurd claims, by raising examples where these were achieved despite the conditions being met.
I suppose I didn't go over the many canals built across China, or the palaces, or the ziggurats, or the temples, or the terracotta warriors, or the Great Wall, or other feats od engineering, but I suppose I am still underestimating the average American population's knowledge of ancient China.
I did misremember: Sporks were used in ancient China, but they were not necessarily invented there. That's my mistake.
Shift the timeframe from 1–2000 AD to 500BC–1500 AD and they would be pretty much on par. Shift it back another 500 years and Europe is a cultural backwater and we'd be debating the Cultural Pantheism argument.
Although I'm in favour of putting our civilisation into historical perspective, which is what you're doing, I'm not sure you're engaging with the argument that the West at its peak has a rate of technological advance and infrastructure building and wealth generation utterly incomparable to the East at its peak.
I fell way from the cultural Christianity argument when one of the new atheists pointed out all the northern European countries are decades ahead of the US in terms of secularization and they seem to be holding it together pretty well. If there's a cultural decline that follows from the decline of Christianity, it seems like it will be decades away relative to the US.
Europe is busily abolishing itself. Not that America isn't, but I don't see America even having an interstitial period of sitting around and enjoying life. When you are steering the ship, it is a bigger philosophical crisis to be going nowhere. America will be hurtling toward something for a while yet.
Western Europe has a serious problem integrating its Muslim immigrants, some of which seem to be more on a path of conquest than co-existence.
That said, this is random fluke of geography, because the Muslim world is close to Europe and far from the US. If the entities were switched, I doubt that the US would fare any better. Too much Islam will destabilize any secular society, and "too much" probably begins at 5 per cent of really religious mainstream Sunni Muslims.
If only. I did see a few Muslims protesting here outside a school teaching gender woo woo to primary school children but that’s been the extent of Muslim interference in local affairs, and sadly it didn’t work.
I think it's also a matter of culture. The US has an identity as "a nation of immigrants", which thus makes it much easier to assimilate people. European countries have ethnicity based identities, and that makes it a lot hard for immigrants to assimilate.
I too dislike the "Cultural Christianity" argument as you outline it, due to your first reason: you should not believe false things are true just because it results in a better outcome. I am a Christian first and foremost because I believe it is true: there is a God, he did incarnate and die for our sins, we can be saved, it is actually better to love your enemy than to hate him, etc. If it's not true, don't believe it. Veracity is one of the chief Christian values! How can you expect to act like a Christian if you are lying?
I disagree strongly with your second reason though, because it is simply not true. Yes, the sects of Christianity that accepted "modernism" have succumbed to modernism. But this is not the model Christian. Evangelicals, fundamentalists, Methodists and Catholics anywhere outside the West, Pentecostals, these traditions have not succumbed to modernism and are alive, well, and thriving. Those Christians who modernize stop being Christians, and become moderns. Those Christians who do not remain Christian. It is a tragedy that so many Christian sects and societies went down the modernizing route, but it wasn't inevitable. It was just a bad choice.
Of course, those sects that chose to modernize were also the most likely to espouse cultural Christianity: that it isn't true, but we should believe it anyway. No wonder they mostly abandoned Christianity with that kind of foundation. If you want a Christian culture, then you need a culture of Christians who actually believe the creeds. Cosplay Christianity cannot stand against modernization; your examples prove that.
Basically all Christians except the Amish aren't insulated enough from modern culture and are just following it with a lag, as evidenced by their dropping fertilities.
Fertility for Americans who attend church weekly has remained consistently above replacement for the last 40 years, with no decline. There has been significant declines for Americans who are religious but don't attend church weekly: in other words, the Christians most likely to have "modernized" or be solely "cultural" Christians.
We don't have great fertility data broken down by denomination. The best I can find is from Pew, from 2015. They have Evangelicals at 2.3, Mainline at 1.9.
Did you look at the data in the link? Among Christians attending church weekly fertility is the same as it was in 1982. How can that happen if all Christian denominations were declining in fertility over the same time period?
If you’re talking about a decline from 1900 then yes, everybody’s declined. In 1982 the national fertility rate was 1.83, today its 1.78, and between that same time the “weekly church” crowd fertility has remained constant.
For the world as a whole, the Christian fertility rate just makes up for the loss of people from "leaving to become moderns". According to Pew based on conversion and fertility trends, they expect that by 2050 Christians will be 31.4% of the global population: the exact same share they had in 2010. Over the same period they expect Christianity to lose about 66 million people to "deconversion", with almost all of them becoming religiously "unaffiliated" which basically means your average secular modern type.
Notably, because of the lack of fertility among the "unaffiliated" despite an expected gain of over 61 million "converts" from other religions Pew expects the percentage of unaffiliated to drop from 16.4% of global population in 2010 to 13.2% in 2050.
I came here to write something very similar to your first point - thank you for doing it so eloquently. I'm reminded of a section from the Screwtape Letters here:
"On the other hand we do want, and want very much, to make men treat Christianity as a means; preferably, of course, as a means to their own advancement, but, failing that, as a means to anything—even to social justice. The thing to do is to get a man at first to value social justice as a thing which the Enemy demands, and then work him on to the stage at which he values Christianity because it may produce social justice. For the Enemy will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of Heaven as a short cut to the nearest chemist’s shop. Fortunately it is quite easy to coax humans round this little corner. Only today I have found a passage in a Christian writer where he recommends his own version of Christianity on the ground that “only such a faith can outlast the death of old cultures and the birth of new civilisations”. You see the little rift? “Believe this, not because it is true, but for some other reason.” That’s the game,
The thing is they don't believe them to be true, they believe them to simply be best for society, i.e. low on religion, high on religiosity. It's not a bad thing either as sometimes they eventually convert but more importantly, their kids or grandkids do. Nobody converts to Aztecism because all of its practitioners are dead. It's irrelevant if Ōmeteōtl is real or not if nobody is around to remember he exists.
The reason that many people change is because the world around them has changed. The ideals and frameworks of religious practice and philosophy were created by a powerful elite during times of cruelty and overbearing control of the masses.
We have evolved to the point where we can see through the wishes of the elite - to maintain control over their 'subjects' through fear of punishment at the end of their lives - and we are no longer naive enough to believe in the myths that they created or the wealth and power they amassed in their humble service...
If people have moved away from the 'core' of Christisn belief, it's because it no longer has social, political or economic relevance and seems to want to remain anchored in a past where ignorance was the principle means of control.
This is known as entropy. Things tend toward chaos and separation from their original state. It's not possible to go back to a previous time or state.
To you, different movements are 'false', to them you are in denial of the reality of living in a modern world where power is fundamentally an archaic and. corrupt artefact and the wish to wield power is not a characteristic of enlightened thinking.
Surely you must know the response to this right? Just like the model Christian hasn’t succumbed to modernism, the model liberal atheist hasn’t either! Lots of groups we can point to who have embraced liberal norms and not fallen for wokeness or brutalism. You’re still missing the analogy!
Among other things, such arguments are ultimately insulting than ordinary atheism - that don't say that Christianity's truth claims are wrong, they say that the truth claims don't matter.
Atheists aren't all alike, and while an atheist might believe that always telling the truth is good, many do not--- marxism, for example. A hard question for anyone, atheist or not, is why we shouldn't all pretend to believe X, and even deliberately induce ourselves to believe X, if believing X will make us healthier, safer, and happier. Mormons seem to live good lives; why not encourage Mormonism, even if it is false?
As a practicing Mormon, I take stories about "intense coercion" with a grain of salt. My family traces its roots in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints clear back to it's founding, yet when my sister stopped going to church, and married a non-Mormon, my parents didn't disown her or raise the roof. Instead they had the wedding at our house. When I was at my parents' for Thanksgiving one year, they also had over a same-sex couple that lived down the road. And they aren't outliers either. All my life I was taught at church that it was important to be good to everyone, whether they eventually got baptized or not, whether they stay active or not. While I can understand others having different experiences (bad apples in every barrel), the concept of the crazy fundamentalist family that beats their kids, disowns them when they go their own way, and never associates with anyone or anything outside their tiny bubble is as foreign to me as the hippie lifestyle.
As another practicing Mormon who grew up in the "bubble" (ok, bubble-adjacent) of the heavily Mormon areas of the West, I fully agree.
Not only that, my older 2 brothers left the church a long time ago. And my parents have gone through hell trying (in the bad years) to maintain contact. It wasn't us who rejected them--rather the reverse. Things are better now, but they weren't then. And my parents were not exactly highly restrictive.
My dad grew up Mormon. He spent day after day in church learning things he knew could not be right and that were at odds with common sense and modern science. He and his brothers were miserable. They reached adulthood, left home, attended Cal, and promptly became far happier than they’d ever been. They never looked back.
Mormonism doesn’t create happy people. Some are happy. But there are tons of unhappy Mormons. Many either leave or are booted from the faith or lie about how they feel because they fear being ostracized.
If you build your methodologies on falsehoods, you can’t troubleshoot them. If you believe a sun god powers your car and it eventually breaks down, you’ll never even consider popping the hood.
My experience has been largely the opposite. The vast majority of Mormons I know are happy, not because they pretend everything's perfect; many are quite open about their struggles, but they view the Gospel as their lifeline. I've known those who've left the church that pretended to be happy but it was quite evident they weren't. (Also see my comment above).
As for science and "common sense", I get that not everything can be explained through religion...yet. But not knowing everything doesn't take away from the knowledge I do have, and the experiences I've had within the church that brought me peace I haven't found anywhere else.
When you say the LDS church brought you peace you haven't found anywhere else, I’m genuinely glad to hear it, just as I’m sure you’re glad to hear of my dad’s peace outside of it. From what you said about not being able to find peace anywhere else, I take it you’re a convert, or that you’ve been both inside and outside the church, like my dad and uncles. If you don’t mind my asking, what was it about the LDS church’s specific scripture that most convinced you it was the truth?
I was born and raised in the Church, (again, see my reply to The Digital Entomologist further up the thread), but I'm a "convert" in the sense that I have a testimony of Christ and the restored gospel, as opposed to just going through the motions. As the kind of geek who would find his way to a blog like Astral Codex and stick around, I'm plenty familiar with alternate creeds and philosophies. I've seen all the arguments against religion, Christianity, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints specifically, and ultimately I found them all wanting. It's not just any specific scripture or grand spiritual experience that has kept me in the Church, it's a broad combination of things.
First, I was fortunate to be raised by loving parents who've lived a Christ-like lifestyle, without fanaticism or hypocrisy.
Second, living the church lifestyle has kept me out of the gutter; no drugs or alcohol, no STDs or unplanned pregnancies, no jail time...
Third, the inspiration of my ancestors. One of them, Cyril Call, at one point had a mob come to his home and say, "Neighbor, we like you, just sign this document renouncing Joseph Smith and we won't have to burn your house down." His response: "You may as well apply the torch." That's not a belief you adopt out of mere convenience.
Fourth, and most important, the feelings I've gotten serving in the church, reading the scriptures, attending the temple, and serving a mission, are unlike any other good feelings I've experienced. The peace, the purpose, the "rightness", I can't deny. I realize this is completely personal and subjective, but it's my own lived experience.
Thanks for answering. I am convinced the correctness of the church is clear and unmistakable to you, or else you wouldn’t have persuaded others through your mission to stake everything on its validity.
Certainty like yours is foreign to me. I’m chronically uncertain. I find I’m always holding mistaken beliefs, and the only way I can identify and correct them is to doubt them all and accept any reasonable evidence that contradicts them. For instance, I don’t know if god exists. I can’t prove it either way. I’m even less certain Jesus was his son. Or that Jesus traveled to North America after his death. Or that Joseph Smith wasn’t mistaken in his recollection of translating golden plates for an angel with the help of stones and his hat between 1827 and 1829. This is all possible, I guess, as far as anything is possible, but it’s difficult for me to understand why it’s obvious that this is a) true and b) the most vital thing anyone can learn.
My family is much like yours. They were among the first Mormons to arrive in Utah. But some of them eventually found the stories behind the church’s claim to divine authority at odds with testable knowledge about the world. Despite this, we don’t have STDs and have managed to stay out of the gutter and jail much like you.
To me, if you put aside the scripture, what you have in the Mormon people is an admirable community of close-knit, prosperous folks who try very hard to do the right thing. But they are not perfect and it’s worth considering they may be mistaken about some matters. As I said, I’m glad you found the truth. I’m not sure how you did it, or how you know you did it, but I’m also not sure about most things.
I suspect that someone is going to successfully come up with a Totally Not A Religion based on the simulation argument. It already has a plausible argument(for the rationalist) for God, you just need some kind of rule set. I could also see someone tying Christianity and the simulation argument together.
Hopefully someone figured it out because our society’s nihilism is going to lead people to argue that AI is better than us and we should let ourselves be supplanted by them.
because there's quite a lot of good evidence for it, both historical and non-historical
even little things like "oh, of course the world would converge on using the date of the simulator's arrival on our timeline as the basis for the calendar"
> "Even the Middle East is gradually becoming less Muslim. "
Is it? Half a century ago Lebanon had non-muslim majority. Iran, Turkey and Afghanistan had secular governments. In most ME countries that are still ruled by officially secular governments wearing of burqas seems to have become significantly more common.
A lot of the backsliding has to do with pushback against the chronic American/ Western meddling in Muslim majority countries that allowed the worst elements of those countries to come to power.
I think a fair bit of that is aggressive proselytization by the Wahhabi sect, a strict version of Sunni Islam which has pushed out many other varieties. It's sponsored by the government of Saudi Arabia, and thus gets a pass from the US government.
Though mind you the final paragraph of the lede in that article says that the Saudis are pulling back on Wahhabism and placing more emphasis on nationalism instead.
I'd guess that's a result of the new leader disliking independent domestic power bases, rather than a commitment to any position I'd endorse. And I'm highly dubious that it will have any immediate effect on the continuing spread of Wahhabist teaching outside Saudi Arabia.
Everything decayed after WW1. So if you reset everything and then successfully avoided a world war, you might be able to avoid the 20th century loss of faith problems.
I think WW1 is the worst that ever happened. It killed the spirit of optimism in Europe, who then infected America with their malaise and also led to Stalin, Hitler and all kinds of bad things.
Agree with this. Scott’s “1880-1930” here is a weird era. EVERYTHING changed after the charnel house of Europe in WW1.
For a great read on this: the first several chapters of “Into The Silence” by Wade Davis which is mostly about the British Everest expeditions of 1921-1924 but the first third of the book is about how WW1 reshaped society. Even the devout didn’t come out of that Hell on earth with the same view of a loving God that they had before.
Did you intentionally avoid mentioning Christmas, Halloween etc.? They are clearly cultural imports from Christianity, but they are also wholesome family fun for a lot of the members of our shared society and I think we would all be worse off if they didn't exist.
I would much rather dwell on the fringes of it than have it abolished outright. From the title I was expecting this to be taking the side of "Christmas in America is bad from a saecular perspective" in the "Is Christmas in America bad from a saecular perspective?" debate, this seems to be rebutting an argument I have never encountered.
>Did you intentionally avoid mentioning Christmas, Halloween etc.? They are clearly cultural imports from Christianity, but they are also wholesome family fun for a lot of the members of our shared society and I think we would all be worse off if they didn't exist.
There's nothing special about Christmas and Halloween. Those could easily be replaced with Lunar New Year and the Ghost Festival.
Absolutely, but in our culture they haven't been, and if we got rid of them I expect we'd have nothing as opposed to immediately picking up their Asian analogues.
I think Europe has done a better job of keeping the fringes of Christianity than America has. The line between Christianity and atheism is much brighter in America. Atheists can still say the Lord’s Prayer here and attend Holy Communion and go to church at Easter. Once you become an atheist in America, you are out.
In Europe they absolutely can not unless they misrepresent themselves to the priest; unless they are Protestant and in that case, it would be true in the US as well as Protestants let everyone partake sans belief in anything everywhere.
I was talking about protestants, not Catholics. But I wasn't referring to the behaviour that the church allows or disallows. I meant how the culture and how other non-Christians react. Atheists rarely go to Holy Communion or midnight mass in America. They definitely wouldn't say The Lord’s Prayer.
Ah fair. I thought you were saying Churches prevent them from participating as opposed to what you were trying to say, my bad.
Yeah I can agree with that observationally. My siblings are atheists and they can't even be bothered to be polite and respect a moment of silence during grace or enter a church for a wedding; I distinctly remember one of my kids once, and not too young but a tween so old enough to ponder, asking "why anytime their uncle or auntie visit they refuse to hold hands when grandma says grace". In fact they are so outright hostile to religion I've seen them skip funerals of friends and family for daring to have a priest there. And no not youthful rebellion, all of us are well into our middle ages and no it's not just them, I've seen the same look of outright contempt and derision when I cross myself in public by people I know to be atheist.
I'd say American atheism is more an outward militant rejection of religion whereas in Europe it's more of religious apathy bordering agnosticism in my experience from living on both continents. I found my atheist German friends never even really thought about religion whereas my Americans ones were consumed with it.
When I came back to England after 24 years in the States, I (atheist) went to Evensong based on a recommendation from Richard Dawkins. I ended up going 3 or 4 times a week and often took (atheist) friends with me. I went to church occasionally in California but never with other atheists.
I think the biggest difference is that people my age (approaching 60) sang hymns and said prayers in school every day (it was the law) in England. We all have fond, cultural memories of it even if we didn't literally believe it. We were and are cultural Christians.
>I'd say American atheist is more a outward militant rejection of religion whereas in Europe it's more of religious apathy bordering agnosticism in my experience from living on both continents. I found my atheist German friends never even really thought about religion whereas my Americans ones were consumed with it.
This is a very defined subset, but not every American atheist is so stunted and trapped in 2013 that they resort to performative antisocial behavior like that. However, a normal person wouldn't label themself an "Atheist"
I think the steelmanned argument SA should tackle is not that Christianity is the predecessor of “what SA likes” (WSAL), but an essential ingredient of WSAL. Sure, it’s not an ingredient that ensures that WSAL will last forever, but there will be no WSAL without this ingredient. Maybe we need Christianity plus another ingredient or just a more resilient version of Christianity that doesn’t give way to too much atheism. This version of the argument requires an empirical refutation not merely a logical one like the one proposed here.
You always have to remember that the Abrahammaic cults all derive from marginal arid-land herder culture which values cattle over human life and is full of morally repugnant concepts like scapegoating which is Christianity’s foundation. The fact that half the New Testament was lifted word for word from Epictetus is no saving grace either. Nietzsche was right about a couple of things. And we see the whole middle east consumed by absolute bullshit that us Northern Europeans should never have allowed ourselves to be drawn into. Let them destroy themselves.
A quick google tells me that he was born in AD 50 and died around 135AD. After Jesus, after St Paul’s epistles and after most of the New Testament. This kind of rhetoric is why I stopped calling myself an atheist a while back. Though I still don’t believe.
I must be missing the point of this. There have been prior Christian cultures which had worse aesthetics, and some which had better, especially when you think about the distribution of aesthetics. The decline in esthetics (degeneration, if you wish), arguably has more to do with the death-grip rise of late-stage capitalism than with a decline in Christianity. And of course, this ignores aesthetics in non-Christian cultures, such as in India and China.
Also, factually, this is just factually wrong. Reform Judaism came before Conservative Judaism; Conservative Judaism was arguably a reaction to Reform Judaism.
As far as the quality of art goes, people have been wondering forever why it tanked after the Roman Empire Christianized. There's no obvious reason that would happen.
But, it does tend to undermine the idea that quality artwork requires a background of Christianity. The power of Christianity seems to have a pretty strong negative correlation to the quality of artwork, with realistic Roman portraits giving way to vague blobby Christian ones as the Dark Ages begin and then coming back as the Renaissance arrives.
The simple explanation would appear to be that the quality of artwork is negatively related to poverty - it's expensive to develop the skills - and the power of organized religion is positively related to poverty. But this theory has trouble explaining why official imperial portraits deteriorated so badly. Poverty can't have been the problem there.
<i>As far as the quality of art goes, people have been wondering forever why it tanked after the Roman Empire Christianized. There's no obvious reason that would happen.</i>
It didn't -- it "tanked" (or rather, became less realistic -- it still looked nice, aesthetically speaking) during the Third-Century Crisis, when the Empire was not only still pagan, but engaged in periodic bouts of anti-Christian persecution.
Christians never claimed that pagans couldn't make works of beauty. That's a symptom of atheist culture (one that does not believe in metaphysics), not pagan (one with mistaken metaphysics).
Edgy atheists are wrong when they claim that atheism is to monotheism as monotheism is to polytheism. Christians can see a lot of truth in e.g. Neoplatonism; Christian missionaries often work by claiming - with full sincerity - that Christianity is the full revelation of truths discovered in part by other religious traditions. Atheism isn't just rejecting one more god, it's rejecting a way of seeing the world common, at its most fundamental level, to almost every human culture throughout history.
But, yes, artistic quality is often a function of money and stability. Artists need money to pursue their vocation full time, and engage in costly projects, and entire communities of linked professions are required to build things like the Hagia Sophia. (Eastern) Rome was capable of great art again by the 500s, not just grand buildings, but excellent portraiture and mosaic work. Then it degraded due to the devastation of the Islamic conquests, and eventually Western Europe surpassed it - but Italy was churning out artistic masterpieces centuries before the Renaissance, when the greatest painters were still working on icons.
IMO, high art dies when it becomes about expressing the ego rather than pursuing beauty. The art world fully embraced egoistic expression over service to a higher ideal in the wake of WW1; that's why everything looks like crap nowadays. If you're disillusioned with higher ideals, and think there's nothing but the world and will, how could it be otherwise? There are far more ways to be original and ugly than original and beautiful.
The other interesting factor is pigments. Pigments require both chemistry / alchemy / scientific-ish knowledge, AND robust trade networks, because both pigments and raw source materials come from various far flung and outlandish places.
Creating esthetically appealing representational art is fundamentally a "tacit knowledge" sort of domain too. If you have one civilizational upset that kills off most of the masters and apprentices, you're kind of boned from there on, because people will have to relearn and reinvent techniques from scratch - see the Renaissance.
The shift from the Roman / Greek wax-encaustic style to paint-on-canvas / other surfaces likely also played a role.
Philip Balls book "Bright Earth" talks about much of these things - I wrote a review here where people can see if they'd be interested in reading the book itself:
Seems like the rebuttal to the ultimate failure of restoring either 1890s norms or 1700s Christianity is that if most everyone were convinced it was a good idea they would have the lesson of 1960-2020 to remind them that what they have is fragile. But we’re a long, *long* way from convincing most everyone that it’s at all desirable to do one or the other. So it’s kind of moot.
Has anyone got a link for context on where Ayaan Hirsi Ali is coming from more specifically?
Her wikipedia bio says "She is a critic of Islam and advocate for the rights and self-determination of Muslim women" so I wouldn't have guessed that she was arguing in favor of a return to Christianity.
I don't know very much of the context but she recently converted to Christianity after being atheist, and had a coming out article that went somewhat viral in which she outlined her reasoning: https://unherd.com/2023/11/why-i-am-now-a-christian/
> The fact is, it is much easier to assimilate Muslims into liberal atheism or highly tolerant forms of Christianity (like Quakers have been running a successful school in Ramallah for over a hundred years with no interference from local Palestinian Muslims) than to “civilizational war” Christianity.
...So why haven't they done it yet? The liberals have been in power for a long time, and they've made practically zero progress towards actually pacifying these peoples.
> The Muslims in the US seem pretty liberal. On abortion, they are more liberal than Catholics and black Protestants:
Which is why the US conservatives fear of Islam is such nonsense. But then 80% see Iran as a threat, which is the same number who can’t find it on a map.
So the west can integrate Muslims in the one country where there is more hysteria about the Islamic threat, than anywhere, and the result of the anti Islamic rhetoric generally ends up with some destruction of a secular country and the rise of militant Islam
Not unique. Conservatives worldwide tend to distrustful of each other because by definition they strongly believe in their own culture/religion etc. Liberalism is universalist ideology, an Arab liberal, American liberal, and an Indian liberal probably believe similar things, just a matter of degree. Conservatism is localist ideology. American conservative love of guns doesn't translate to a Japanese conservatives love of the Emperor.
I find this cultural Christianity argument especially silly because my strong perception is these people don't at all mean the 1890s when they say Retvrn. The imagery is Crusades, Benedictine robes, idyllic mediaeval villages. Oddly I find it has something in common with regrowth environmentalism.
The pretension that anyone who has accepted modernity ought to help them is strange. I personally get the appeal they're going for, it ends up on my feed and friends send me reels in this style, but it's so obviously a hollow larp. If they were serious they'd be getting out there and living it.
Maybe they are, mind you, maybe that sort of thing is kept off the internet. I don't think a mediaeval village (with near exclusively white people, odds on) would last under the ire of the modern state. One glance from a middle aged bureaucrat and it gets messy. All that to say we might be a little harsh on this viewpoint since anyone who follows the ethos to it's conclusion doesn't stick around to make their case.
Then again sans ladies it won't happen, so I doubt it.
Of the folks I'm talking about, I think you're right, but I personally think I've got a nuanced point of view. We've lost a great deal in the march into modernity. Maybe it's worth it, but some of us look back with sadness.
Thanks. What I was trying to say was the RETVRN those people are looking for might have more in common with 1890 than you or they realise. E.g I'm Catholic and go to the traditional latin Mass. Whilst I strongly believe what I'm doing is in continuity with medieval culture, the liturgical culture I support is that of c.1850 - 1960. E.g frequent communion does have some pedigree but it did fall out of use in places and was vigorously promoted by Pius X at the turn of 19th/20th century.
Interesting point. Reminds me of how most Viking revival aesthetics have no roots past Wagnerian romanticism.
I don't feel vulnerable to this criticism myself though. I've gotten my ill feelings about modernity and admittedly romantic feelings about mediaeval times from reading of a time before industrialisation, the times when commons still existed, and man lived closer to a state of nature. Nature in the sense of an emergent pattern, infinitely complex like the unfolding of a living creature, and undisturbed by the Cartesian cult of measurement and rationality that would break the world against our whims. Now our reality is an invention of our hubris, our abstracted and rootless fancy. I envy you that you have religion in these times, I've never been to a church service myself.
Of course I would choose today on the balance. High child mortality, dogmatic religion, pervasive and hard poverty, I wouldn't want them back and they come in that package. But I won't then ignore what we have lost, and I sincerely wonder if all this can last if we remain estranged from nature.
Yes, Christianity descended into wokeism, but the people pushing it in this direction in the beginning didn't know that's where things were headed. Are we not allowed to learn from our mistakes? To try cultural Christianity again recognizing where it's weak points were, and patching them?
Sure, but that argument applies to anything. Try the New Deal again while patching the weak points. Try Golden Age Islam again. Heck, try Communism again! What you need is an argument that Christianity has a unique benefit beyond other ideologies or belief systems.
A mathematical translation of the sermon on the mount is: “You can use a greedy algorithm to obtain a future outcome far better than your ability to plan for. Instead of trying to control the branching space of future possibilities, All you have to do is, aim at the highest good you can think of each morning, and then focus on the problems of the day. The ROI of doing good things goes up much more if you’re voluntarily suffering to do those good things.”
This is predictive theory and can easily be tested by anyone who is interested. I think this core is what made Christianity produce such powerful cultures, and it’s accessible to anyone of a scientific bent, even an atheist. All you have to do is try it and see how it works for you. It does require pretending that “good” means something real, but the only real barrier there is willingness to try the experiment.
This might be good advice, but where are you finding it in the Sermon on the Mount? Maybe 6:25-34, where Jesus says to focus on doing the will of God and not worry about where your next meal and clothing will come from? I don’t see how to read it in your way without some extremely aggressive heresy, especially not when it comes to being testable. The Kingdom of God is not of this earth; almost the entire point of the religion, not to mention other parts of this is very sermon, is not to look for your reward in the kingdom of man.
Humans gonna human. There are still some kinks to work out, but we'll get them worked out at some point. Ultimately, the organized are more powerful than the violent even if there are regressions, and we might be heading into one of those regressions as we speak. But seeing the world clearly is important; and shedding superstition, while it may not happen in our lifetime, will be an important part of advancing civilization.
I think we’ll eventually get this worked out too. We have a couple of hundred years before it gets existence-threatening and culture and/or technology will have figured something out by then.
It seems this argument only holds if we believe that the progress of a religion is inevitable from any given starting point. If we think that the progression to modernity was contingent on something else, then you might argue that you could retvrn to Christianity and stay there.
I'm much more interested in the argument about whether morality, meaning, purpose, etc. can be established on a secular foundation. I think they can and should be, but this seems to be a minority view.
I also think we shouldn't give up on the “but it's not actually practical to believe false things” argument, that seems important.
I doubt atheism itself is the reason for less crime, much more likely that atheists are generally more intelligent, and intelligent people are much less likely to commit crime or at least much less likely to be caught...
Can morality be established on a secular foundation? Sure. Jeremy Bentham already did that. It's just likely to be some form of utilitarianism because deontological ethics is harder to establish without some form of religion. And it is unlikely that whatever the society comes up with will stay secular.
Human beings need something to believe in and they have a tendency to believe in the irrational. Ergo, quasi religious beliefs will pop up. I will venture and say no civilization can last a full century without some kind of religion stitching the populace together.
Individuals can be atheist and moral. Societies cannot be atheist. Societies are brought together by myths. Those myths become religious in character if not in substance. This is the distinction that the New Age atheists failed to consider. They had imagined a world of sober, moral atheists going about their business without recourse to christianity. They got instead new flavours of irrationality and hysteria, the emergence of Islam thanks to demographic change, the blossoming of cults, et cetera.
When it comes to religion, it's a strictly pick your poison game. And I've got to say of all the many out there, Christianity is far superior to most other alternatives. That much, I think, is obvious from all of the change currently going on
Are you planning on using science to prove the existence of things that are entirely fictional? Because that's just not how it works. That is why humans need religion. Men cannot be trusted to act in the interests of the collective. That is why they need to be shepherded. And the man who controls God, controls man.
I think the model is something like increased wealth from industrialization -> secularism & modernity. (I think that Scott has made this argument more explicitly elsewhere.)
Actually looking at the history of secularization in the West in detail makes it seem much more contingent. France secularized in the mid 1700s, at least 100 years before the rest of Europe and well before France industrialized. Much of the rest of Europe secularized in the late 1800s or early 1900s. The US has had waves of secularization interspersed with Great Awakenings.
I’m perpetually baffled by complaints like the ones Scott is expressing on behalf of fin de siecle art/architecture/society. For one, just google “rococo molding” and you’ll find suppliers of the most ornate, opulent, maximalist millwork you can install in your very own home! You can also find both vintage and newly manufactured art nouveau fixtures to live in your own little Viennese retreat.
And if your complaint is more about the buildings you see on the streets, get together with some friends, buy some land, and build a lovely little 3-story with a decorative facade.
Markets—the great obsession of libertarianism—decreed the architecture we enjoy now, but as a consequence of rising living standards. Stone work is now highly skilled labor and is hideously expensive. This is a result of cheaper materials obsoletising many stone masons and labor being generally more expensive than it used to be.
Nothing old (with some very rare exceptions) is gone, it’s just gotten more expensive. You can still have that old world, it’s just likely not where you are.
I don't think I can ever buy the notion that aesthetics is anything but purely subjective taste. That may be the YIMBY in me when NIMBYs oppose perfectly fine buildings on aesthetic grounds which ultimately leads to homeless people 20 years down the road leaving litter all over the park, despite the fact that nobody has more time to put garbage into a trash can than a person with absolutely nothing else to do.
You're tracing homelessness to the wrong root. A lot of it is malicious linguistics: people say "homeless" to make it sound like a housing problem, when it's not and never was. They say that to avoid talking about the real problems, which are almost invariably 1) drugs, 2) mental illness, or 3) drugs *and* mental illness.
Building more housing won't fix that. What fixes it is going after the root causes of drug abuse and mental illness.
Yes. And then they can move somewhere where it's less expensive, or stay with friends and family while they get back on their feet. People have resources and social networks that can and consistently do help with housing difficulties. So-called "homelessness" is not the result of lacking housing; it's the result of lacking the social capital to help you deal with a lack of housing. And in practice, this only tends to happen due to drugs or untreated mental illness.
<i>I’m perpetually baffled by complaints like the ones Scott is expressing on behalf of fin de siecle art/architecture/society. For one, just google “rococo molding” and you’ll find suppliers of the most ornate, opulent, maximalist millwork you can install in your very own home! You can also find both vintage and newly manufactured art nouveau fixtures to live in your own little Viennese retreat.</i>
That's a bit like saying "I'm perpetually baffled by people complaining about living in a society of drug addicts when they can easily just not do drugs." Yes, personal choice is a thing, but having to endure the stench of weed every time I leave my house is still going to impact my quality of life, even if I myself never touch the stuff.
<i>Markets—the great obsession of libertarianism—decreed the architecture we enjoy now, but as a consequence of rising living standards. Stone work is now highly skilled labor and is hideously expensive. This is a result of cheaper materials obsoletising many stone masons and labor being generally more expensive than it used to be.</i>
(1) It's possible to mass produce architectural decorations. Indeed, people did mass produce them back in the Victorian era, using ceramics or concrete.
(2) Lots of the ugliest modern buildings are hideously expensive both to build and to maintain.
(3) Lots of pretty classical buildings don't actually have loads of fancy decoration.
"Stone work is now highly skilled labor and is hideously expensive. This is a result of cheaper materials obsoletising many stone masons and labor being generally more expensive than it used to be."
This is apparently only technically true. Scott once linked to an article about how you can now get concrete that looks exactly like traditional stonework, and is much cheaper.
There's also the intriguing possibility of AI+robots soon being able to automate stonecutting, doing away with the part that makes it prohibitively expensive.
The then-ascendant Authoritarian/Identitarian strain of the progressive movement fundamentally overplayed its hand in the covid-fueled madness of 2020, and while it momentarily achieved an impressive degree of success in getting mainstream institutions to signal support for its values, that very success has been their undoing as it was enough of a shock for a lot of moderates (who the radicals still rely on to form any kind of effective coalition) to realise, after the dust settled, how crazy things were getting and quietly return to a footing where they're at least capable of being sceptical of the dominant progressive argument (which they mostly seemed to stop being after the 'opposite' shock of Trump's election in 2016).
Identitarian progressives have gained a lot of ground in the past decade, but their offensive has culminated - very few major new institutions have changed course in a direction that favours them in the last 2-3 years, and some (like the elite US universities, which are a bellwether for this kind of thing) have even begun to swing gently back away from it. I do fear that if Trump is re-elected in november that the same panic as before will re-empower the worst elements of the movement.
Doesn't the argument given in your preface already incorporate the substance of your second objection?
The argument 'if you want the cultural values of the 1890s, you should try to build the truly robust Christian culture from which that culture arose' assumes the degeneration you're pointing to- otherwise how will rebuilding a truly robust (Medieval?) Christian culture produce your desired outcome of the 1890s?
Maybe it's not explicitly stated, and maybe Christianists who make the argument are just being shallow or dishonest, but the argument you open with is *only a persuasive argument* if it *assumes* that the process of degeneration will recur, no?
Might be easier to view cultural Christianity as being useful to flatten the curve, as we tried doing with COVID, so not to overwhelm and break the system, while we we're sitting at its table.
> The few sects that escaped decay - ultra-Orthodox Jews, Amish, the Taliban - seem neither clearly scaleable
Why don't they seem scaleable? Islamic caliphates that the Taliban harks back to once spread over relatively large scales.
> At the very least, they suggest one would need a very different kind of Christianity than the West had in 1700s - one as strict, isolationist, and inward-looking as the Amish - to have a fighting chance.
Roughly true, though there is the possibility of a cyclical process whereby you have something like Orthodox Judaism following the progression to Conservative, Reform, and nothing, at which point it gets replaced by a resurgence of Orthodox Judaism to begin the cycle again.
> If modern atheists want a society better than our current one (or rather, better than wherever modern culture is leading us) they'll have to invent some new cultural package that's never been seen before. I don't know what that is, but I prefer to maintain my intellectual integrity while I look for it
It's possible that modern atheists are just never going to find it, just as stable cultural packages of the past weren't invented by modern atheists.
I say no to the idea of Cultural Christianity, Cultural Judaism, or Cultural Islam. We don’t need to replace Wokeness with anything. Just get rid of it and move on. If something like Wokeness emerges, don’t let it become dominant. Are we not intelligent beings?
“Cultural Christianity” makes total sense… if you completely disregard the contributions to modern civilization made by the Greeks and preserved and refined by Muslims while “Christian Europe” decayed during the dark ages. It wasn’t until explorers went to the universities and libraries of Baghdad and bought the works of Plato and Aristotle back to Europe that significant cultural change occurred. St. Augustine was smart enough to understand the value of these ideas and crammed them in to the version of Christianity that people think of as the foundation of liberalism. It’s not - it’s just Greek philosophy filtered through Islamic scholars and fused with Christianity.
Ayan Hirsi Ali was scarred by effed up people who took the Quran seriously. Everyone who takes religion seriously is usually effed up - it doesn’t matter if those people are Muslim or Christian Evangelicals or Catholics or Orthodox Jews or Amish or Son of Sam or Trump Supporters. But Ali isn’t great at nuance and couldn’t acknowledge this fact.
To be fair, I’m sure it was difficult to do once she fell in with the Sam Harris/Douglas Murray/Bill Maher crowd who lauded her for her “brave anti-Islam stance” because it reinforced their own beliefs.
If you're referring to the Greek Dark Age, that's not accurate - they had no presence in written history beforehand. (They do have tangential mentions in Egyptian and Anatolian records, but nothing at the level of, say, specifying where they live.)
It's because of an deep culturally hatred towards non-Papist Christians hence our hatred of Russia to. Better a enlightened Muhammad save Western society than than an obnoxious non-Roman patriarch who refused to play second fiddle to his nominal peer
It really depends on the nature of the contributions to western civilization that you are concerned with. If you mean technological and scientific contributions, then Christianity had much less to do with that. In fact, it was often in the way( the most memorable example of this is of course Galileo's inquisition with the church even though the church was much less antagonistic than popularly taught). Were many of the scientists who led the scientific revolution such as Newton religious? Sure, but their religion was incidental to the science.
But if you mean sociopolitical, economic, and legal contributions, the history of the West would look very different and a lot worse without Christianity. It is Christianity which outlawed polygamy thereby preventing the kinds of family formation that obtain elsewhere which encourage nepotism and lower parental investment.
It is Christianity with its emphasis on the equality of all before God, an idea that survives most memorably in the American constitution. The greeks did not believe in the equality of all.
It is Christianity, protestantism in particular, which encouraged high literacy rates and extolled the virtues of hard work as a way to distinguish yourself as one of the chosen, an effect Max Weber famously noticed.
It is Christianity with its give unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and unti God that which is God's ideal that contributed to the separation of church and state, a distinction that did not exist elsewhere in the world at the time.
It is Christianity with its practice of extensive donations to the church and the poor that sowed the seeds for the modern welfare state. It's not a coincidence it happens first in extremely protestant Prussia.
And finally, it is Christianity with its new testament ideals and its linear narrative of history with the promise of an eternal paradise that has gone on to inspire countless works of western art, literature, philosophies, and ideologies.
The West has a lot to thank this uniquely strange religion for. It forgets that to its own peril.
Galileo's trial for heresy occured after the Pilgrims celebrated the first Thanksgiving. Yet that's the only example than anyone ever gives of the Church's suppression of scientific inquiry.
Well, if you are looking for plenty of anti scientific things the church either did or was done in the name of Christianity, there are the recurring witch-hunts and the very last one was in the nineteenth century in Prussia, less than 200 years ago.
It is true that the church was much less antagonistic to scientific inquiry than commonly taught though and the pattern of interference seems to be strongest when it came to cosmology and astronomy( Giordano Bruno for instance was burned at the stake when he refused to recant and Galileo's strides in the discipline certainly didn't win him many friends). This makes strategic sense for the church because those ideas directly challenge biblical notions of God and Heaven. They were much less concerned with scientific work in biology or natural physics for instance until evolution of course.
It's also interesting that by the medieval era, Christianity had been fused with Aristotelianism and so it's difficult to say how much of the church's reaction was due to scientific contradictions of Aristotle rather than the bible strictly per se.
However, religious devotion and scientific inquiry generally do not mix well. Christianity is fully guilty of this and so interestingly enough is wokeness which has weaponized pseudo science to its own benefit. A religion will always make honest evidence based inquiry a secondary concern because it has to. Its edicts must always come first.
You're equating witch-hunts with restrictions on scientific inquiry? Is it your understanding that Prussian witches were lady scientists, with covens full of Marie Cuties doing important work to discover the properties of the atom? Do you think the Church was restricting anyone doing actual science 200 years ago? If the Church had been looking to restrict science 200 years ago, they should have focused on Michael Faraday, James Watt, and Joseph Henry, not on a bunch of lesbians chanting in the woods.
I don't think it's hard to comprehend how in an environment full of witch-hunts, honest scientific inquiry might be harder to come by. The opportunity cost of such a rigid hysteria is obvious after a few moments of consideration, unless you believe witches and covens actually exist, in which case the argument ceases to be logical.
Also, the church did obstruct scientific inquiry. They banned several books, they were and in many ways still are unfriendly to Darwin's theory of evolution, and they clearly were no friends of the Enlightenment, although by that time the power of the church as an ideological hegemony was mostly spent.
" If the church wanted to go after scientific inquiry, they should have gone after Faraday, ..." That was already the later half of the nineteenth century. That's like saying because Soviet Union did little to counter the spread of capitalism in the 1980s, they were aligned with it. They were already, by that time, well past their peak.
I'm not sure what you think the Enlightenment has to do with science. The Scientific Revolution of the late-Renaissance preceded the Enlightenment, and by some accounts concluded at the outset of the Enlightenment, which was a philosophical movement. Of course, the shared atheist and Protestant myth is that everyone was bumbling around in the dark, not doing any Science until along came the Enlightenment Proto-Dawkinses came in and showed everyone that God was fake and chemistry was real.
Most of Faraday's important work took place in the first half of the 19th century, right around the time of the witch hunts that you say demonstrate that that Christianity was anti-science.
<i>It's also interesting that by the medieval era, Christianity had been fused with Aristotelianism</i>
No, the idea that medieval people were slavishly devoted to Aristotle is a myth spread by early modern polemicists. It's like the 17th-century equivalent of "I'm a bold truth-teller, people who disagree with me are normie sheeple who unthinkingly swallow the party line".
I think that kind of implies that Christianity and Islam developed in a vaccum and then later encountered Greek philosophy? Or at least they initially had no Greek influence and then later were influenced by it. But Christianity is a product of the Greco-Roman world. Greeks were likely amongst the very first Christians(Saints Luke and Timothy come to mind) and within a decade or two of its founding, I reckon most Christians were Greeks. Christianity is one of the heirs of the ancient Greek world(And Islam developed from some variations and mixtures of Christianity and Judaism(and thus so was also an heir of the Greeks from its birth). In my view, the West is the heir to Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome, all influenced by and influencing each other.
I'd say the religion does matter quite a lot in *how* effed up one can be. Ayaan may focus on Islam for personal reasons, but it is a uniquely problematic set of religious beliefs in the modern age - there are no-to-minimal suicide bombings, for example, without a fervent belief in martyrdom, which is not present in all religions. There are other problematic differences, but Harris has done this topic to death, and you're aware of him, so I won't go on.
Why do you think that Islam has especially “fervent beliefs about martyrdom” compared to other religions - including one that is *literally symbolized* by a device that was used to kill someone for their religious beliefs?
Is it because you subconsciously associate a Christian “martyr” as someone who is unjustly persecuted for practicing religion while associating a Muslim “martyr” as someone who is willing to die for their beliefs *by harming others*? Why the distinction? Especially since the Greek term *martyr* and the Arabic term *Shahid* both translate to something like “witness” or “testimony”?
Islam is close to 1,500 years old. Were suicide bombings (or the equivalent) a hallmark of Muslims throughout that time? Why not?
Japanese *Kamikaze* pilots notably used suicide attacks during World War II. Were they inspired by Islamic teachings? Does Shintoism also have “especially fervid beliefs about martyrdom” that explains why Japanese pilots preferred that mode of attack while American Christian pilots preferred killing their enemies with nuclear weapons?
Could it be possible that “Islam has fervent beliefs about martyrdom” is just a convenient retcon some dude named Altman came up with to explain why suicide bombing is more commonly used by aggrieved Muslims than other aggrieved populations? Could there be other non-religious based explanations to explain this correlation?
I also just reject that Christianity was anything other than incidental to classical liberalism. People tend to equate Christianity with the founding of america, even though the pilgrims were probably less important than the capitalists, and the actual philosophers/writers of the time were mostly skeptical of Christianity.
> the pilgrims were probably less important than the capitalists
And where did capitalism come from? It was invented by Adam Smith, who for all that people these days like to call him a great economist, was a *moralist* first and foremost. He wrote _The Theory of Moral Sentiments_ as an exploration of Christian morality, and _The Wealth of Nations,_ in which he defined capitalism, was a follow-up to it. It is largely concerned with how to have a prosperous market economy that operates in a morally virtuous manner, and how to avoid all of the horrible things libertarians love to do with what they call "capitalism" that brings the word into so much disrepute these days.
Without Christianity, there is no capitalism; the closest you'd get is rapacious corporatism.
Personally, I think Weber has it exactly 180 degrees wrong there. People in charge will invent a religion that says they're good people if their old one doesn't.
You can proffer whatever opinion you like; in fact capitalism started only in Protestant states, then spread from there.
So it’s not a law of nature, obviously, and no one can prove all counterfactuals. But unlike you, he’s got facts on his side, where you have only speculation.
P.S. I happen to agree with your second sentence. But it’s an almost entirely different subject then your original assertion about Christianity being incidental to the rise of classical liberalism.
If it was incidental, then where was the classical liberalism of non-Christian cultures? I would go further and say that classical liberalism was also absent from, for example, Orthodox Christianity.
I'm not sure I agree - I think you and I might be using "classical liberalism" differently - but I would be very interested in reading more about this, if you'd care to expand on it?
It would be a better argument if we meant something a bit more specific here. There are and have been lots of Christian cultures (missionaries do that), but we typically only refer to one time period in a couple places as classically liberal. Why haven't any nascent Christian cultures developed on to classical liberalism in Africa or Asia?
If "Christianity collapsed into wokeness and postmodernism", it's because wokeness and postmodernism are broken forms of Christian belief in disguise. "The last shall be first", "saints and sinners", the apocalypse -- all easily map to wokeness, which forms the appeal for people who grew up in Christian culture without the religious/ritual pieces. The "Cultural Christian" argument is to embrace the ritual parts (Bible stories, baptism, forgiveness, funerals that talk about heaven and hell). You don't have to "believe" these rituals any more than "Cultural Jewish" believes in circumcision or bar mitzvahs. Wokeness will collapse too unless it recognizes this.
So what’s the best way in the medium term to transmit Judeo-Christian values to the masses?
Because in practice, that’s what we’re talking about, right?
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and all that.
Your logic seems to miss a step - even if what you assert is true - that Christianity begets liberalism begets doom - if nothing else, you left out of the analysis that the sooner Judeo-Christian values decay, the sooner the badness occurs.
IMO you are letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. I.e. your argument is that since Culture Christianity is imperfect, why support it at all?
Churchill had the answer to the question: Democracy is the worst form of government ever invented…
Cultural Christianity is also not necessarily useful. If you really do think that the societies built on Christianity were preferable and that Christianity was a necessary component to their continuation, you should wish there to be authentic Christians in society to rehabilitate these cultures, rather than erzatz cultural Christians who were not the key component in these societies’ successes and failures to begin with.
Just as there are secular Jews today, there could be or already are secular Christians (who respect and admire the essential aspects of Christian spirituality and ethics but are not devoted religious individuals). This is a good contribution to modern and liberal Western civilization. But this is something peripheral to your central point.
A "secular Jew" is a member of the Jewish ethnic group, so there's the level of cultural cohesion that continues to exist even when the religion is removed. Christianity doesn't work that way.
The closest Christianity can come to this is to tie certain aspects of Christianity to ethnic identity, e.g. the Italian tradition of the Seven Fishes dinner on Christmas Eve. In other words, if you're italian, you do this Christian thing even if you don't believe in Christianity.
Nietzsche also argued in the Geneology of Morals that Christianity has undermined the concepts of traditional good and evil, leaving us with a slave morality that has persisted for hundreds of years (e.g. slavery bad, equality is good, etc. ). If Nietzsche is right then I think it is very hard for western atheists to escape from being a 'cultural christian'. This is the core criticism I think: if you are rejecting Christianity but not the morality then you are still a Cultural Christian. Repackaging Christian beliefs as rational precepts doesn't feel very authentic. And those do really escape find themselves in uncomfortable places in doing so. (e.g. Overman, Will to power, etc.)
A long list of "firsts" in morality, but very thin on theology & hierarchy. Rather adherence to a set of practices (an hour of silent prayer unless one feels lead to share a message, acting only in unity, etc).
Not much for the decorative arts though
Moral revelation "firsts"
Beginning - Men, women and all people are equal
1690s - Prison should be to reform and not punish
1730s to 1770s - Slavery is a moral outrage
WW 1 - Strangers starving far away should be feed
1962 - Gay marriage is as acceptable as straight marriage
I was told that our British Friends published a book "Quakers and Sex" in 1962 or 1963 (approved) with the quote "The genders of a couple in a loving committed couple make no moral distinction".
I'm pro-religion in the sense that I think the world would be better if more people were religious. I'm also pro-science, and think we can have religion without the supernatural. I don't think we need "cultural Christianity" specifically, but I claim that a functional society needs cultural religions to teach useful values and help people figure out how to live well.
I believe we need religion because adult developmental psychology suggests we do. For those not familiar, the basic idea is that psychological developmental stages aren't just for kids, but also for adults. Kegan's model is probably the most popular, but Cook-Greuter's is better. I'll use Kegan's to make my case since more people know it.
Kegan's model contains 5 levels. I'll skip 1 and describe the rest (with some help from Claude):
2. Imperial Mind (childhood to adolescence): People at this stage develop a sense of self separate from others. They focus primarily on their own needs and interests, struggling to fully consider others' perspectives. They understand rules mainly in terms of personal consequences rather than social contracts. Relationships are viewed in terms of personal benefit. They can delay gratification for short-term goals but struggle with long-term planning. Self-regulation is developing but still limited.
3. Socialized Mind (adolescence to adulthood): People at this stage operate within shared social values and expectations. They derive their sense of self largely from relationships and social roles. They rely heavily on the beliefs of others to understand the world, especially those of authority figures. They struggle with conflicting expectations between different social groups and have difficulty critically analyzing social norms.
4. Self-Authoring Mind (some adults): People at this stage develop their own internal authority and value system. They can critically examine societal expectations and create their own ethical framework. They mediate between different values and construct personal solutions to complex problems. They take responsibility for their choices and pursue long-term goals despite social pressures. While they consider others' perspectives, their sense of self isn't dependent on others' approval.
5. Self-Transforming Mind (rare in adults): People at this stage recognize the limitations of their own ideology and identity. They can simultaneously hold multiple, even contradictory, systems of meaning without needing to reconcile them. They have a fluid, continually evolving sense of self. They engage with and learn from radically different perspectives, recognizing the interconnectedness of all systems. They navigate complexity with ease and have a meta-awareness of the process of meaning-making itself.
If this is your first time hearing about Kegan, a few things probably jump out to you, like that some adult-aged people fail to fully make the transition from 2 to 3. What you might also notice, which David Chapman of meaningness.com has explored extensively, is that the modern world asks people to operate at least at stage 4 and ideally at stage 5, but also contains few structures for supporting people at stage 3. Chapman calls this the "meaningness crisis", and he's worked hard to produce content to help people make the transition from 4 to 5.
I'm personally a bit more interested in all those people we've abandoned at stage 3. This is traditionally the role religion fills. But modernism chased people away from religion. Political parties have stepped in the fill the void, but they do the same job worse because they exist to gain power, and only support people to the extent it helps the party gain power.
Religions on the surface don't seem much better. But religions don't exist for a single purpose like political parties do (in the sense that religions don't go away if you pull out any one of the things they are about, but political parties dissolve immediately if they are not an effective path to power). This gives them the excellent quality of not being incentivized to optimize for any one thing to the exclusion of other things. And in that optimization slack, they have taken up the purpose of helping people live their lives well. Sometimes they do this for theoretical reasons, like wanting to bring people close to God, but they also do it for practical reasons, like it's better to live surrounded by people who are better to get along with.
Now, I want to be clear, I'm not here to say all religions are equally good at the thing I care about, which is supporting people at stage 3, and ideally also supporting them in their transition to 4 and 5. But if you go back and look at what people at stage 3 need and you look at what a religion like Christianity offers, you'll discover a lot of overlap.
If I've convinced you, what should we do? I think you should find and join a religion that doesn't care what you believe. Christianity and Islam and unusually focused on belief, whereas most religions care more about actions. This makes them both have weird failure modes, and one of those is scaring away people who get to stage 4 and realize there's no God as he has been literally described by religious authorities. That's how we got where we are today with modernism driving people away from religion.
I decided to adopt Zen Buddhism. Other people I know who consider themselves rationalists and don't believe in invisible dragons have become Quakers or Unitarians or started practicing Buddhisms other than Zen. I can't say it's all easy: lots of people have religious trauma that makes it hard for them to connect with religion. But it's my belief that religions fill a common psychological need that most people have, especially when they are at stage 3, and the lack of something to fill that need causes societal disfunction.
But why do we want people to get to stage 4 and 5 in the first place? Such people are dangerous. Any values that they develop on their own have a very high chance to conflict with the interests of the collective. Like a cancer eating away at the body. It's better to simply keep most of the population under control, no?
My assumption is that people being more whole is better than them being less whole. The idea that society should be constituted mostly of people who are less whole than they could be is morally and spiritually objectionable, whatever the practicalities of the matter may be.
(one reply to this would be to assert that most people will never get to stage 4 or 5 anyway, so any such measures would make a direct difference to the experience of only a minority of people, even if they thereby succeed in maintaining society for all others. )
From a stage 3 perspective, we don't. But people are going to bust through stage 3 anyway.
The bigger issue is that today we have a society designed only for stages 4 and 5. That's what modernism and postmodernism are about. But by not providing real options to support people at stage 3, they end up trapped in various weird stages of development.
Some people stay stuck at stage 2 because they lack the structure they need to get to stage 3. Some of them manage to get to stage 3 only with the help of our remaining stage 3 organizations, like the military.
Other people get stuck in a weird version of stage 3 that is based on a compression of modernism or postmodernism into stage 3 terms. This is what happens to, for example, the people who "believe in science" as if it were a religion or make a political party or company they work for (a structure you can only maybe navigate without it taking advantage of you at stage 5) their replacement religion.
There's much we could say about the modern world and why it structurally tries to force people out of stage 3 whether they're ready for that or not. David Chapman has written on this extensively, and I recommend reading his writing on this rather than mine. A good starting point is: https://meaningness.com/systematic-mode
Yes. Frankly, stage 4 and 5 remind me of people with Narcissistic Personality Disorder that I used to know. Or in one case, someone who could easily have become a cult leader but decided to do something more productive with their life.
I'd talk about "modernity" rather than "modernism", which is an artistic movement.
Modernity has a few ideologies, mainly: liberalism, socialism, fascism.
Maybe the only "coherent" way out of modernity is if science fully decodes the human brain and the human consciousness (and its interplay with human DNA), opening the door to the cyborg.
A transcendent overcoming of modernity rather than literal reactionary conservatism.
This is standard Yuval Harari, and I think he's right on this.
Somebody has probably already pointed this out, but the New Testament explicitly points out that if Christianity is bogus then Christian’s are the lamest folks fit to be pitied only.
But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen: And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that he raised up Christ: whom he raised not up, if so be that the dead rise not. For if the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised: And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins. Then they also which are fallen asleep
in Christ are perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.
Not exactly a ringing endorsement of cultural Christianity…
Besides the arguments in this post, I don't see why we should assume the ways you describe some past societies were better had anything to do with their being more religious (or closer to a more religious past). I see wokeness and excessive slave morality as orthogonal to Christianity at best, if not in some cases mildly supported by its ethics; past societies were unwoke and less slave moralist despite Christianity, not because of it.
To me, Christian ethics and thus "cultural Christianity" is unappealing in the first place, from the easy targets like treating victimless sexual activities as sins, to the whole "turn your other cheek" ethic.
50 percent of a society is below median -- by any metric you choose. Ergo, somebody has to be better than median to offset those below. Democratic government cannot provide this -- by definition.
There needs to be organizations which strive to be better than median, without expectation that everyone meets those standards. Christianity began as such an organization. Christians were to be "salt of the earth" and to get through a "narrow gate."
But then the Church tried to shove everyone through that narrow gate. This led to both really ugly forcible conversions and watering down of Christian standards.
The restoration of religious freedom is in many respects a return to original Christianity. But, alas, the urge to get everyone through to door has led many a denomination to dumb down Christianity. We are experiencing the results...
This seems to imply that you can't shift the median itself. Part of the point of Christianity is to make everyone behave better. Sure, they'll be a distribution of how well behaved people are, but raising the median benefits everyone.
As a Christian, in my circles "cultural Christians" is a well-known term and not a positive one: we don't really want more of them. The idea that when Christianity is the dominant culture there's a ton of people who are "Christian" by default without really having any serious commitment to the faith.
From a Christian perspective, there are certainly downsides to Christianity's loss of cultural centrality, but the falling off of "cultural christians" is, I think, often viewed as a good thing. It's better, in a lot of ways, to have a smaller-on-paper religion consisting just of the more serious members than to have a huge religion where a huge chunk of the "adherents" only show up on Christmas and Easter and don't think about it all on the other 363.24 days of the year.
This "smaller but more committed" faith is both the original form of the faith - there weren't many "Chreasters" when Christianity was an illegal, underground faith in Rome - and it's also a form that has been seen in modern times in places that have been hostile to the faith, like China where it's shown to be strain of the religion that's pretty resistant to eradication.
If things keep going the way they're going culturally (and they might, and they might not, and as Dan Carlin would say, either way is interesting), this is where I see Christianity going in the West - not extinct but not a dominant force in the culture, either. And I don't think it's only 'extreme' versions that will survive - I think there's going to continue to be mainline Catholics and mainline Protestants, just in smaller numbers.
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If there's a point to the 'cultural christianity' argument, I think it's just that it'd be nice if people did appreciate the extent to which modern 'liberal' values have largely come from Christianity - this is the point that historian Tom Holland (not that Tom Holland) makes in Dominion (not the animal-welfare "Dominion" book that was in the book review contest) - not that I want people to be 'cultural Christian' but it's a good antidote to the frankly revisionist histories going around about how all the church ever did was oppress people, burn witches, murder scientists, and start wars.
It's tricky - on the one hand, yeah, what you say can happen - someone can be a cultural Christian, then go through some (often difficult) life-experience and end up getting serious.
... but I'd say the far more common outcome is that cultural Christianity often "inoculates" people against a more serious strain of Christianity - people are exposed to weak and distorted strains of Christianity and it makes them non-receptive to stronger strains. "Moral therapeutic deism" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moralistic_therapeutic_deism) is a great description of what that sort of 'inoculation' dose of Christianity looks like.
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But like I said, it's tricky - at the end of the day is it better to have a religion consisting of a million nominal believers of which 20% are serious or one consisting of a hundred thousand people, of which 100% are serious? The first has double the number of serious believers, but the second is probably a lot more Effective. (But of course, ultimately, it's not our call to make)
I was scrolling down looking for this perspective from somebody who actually believes in Christianity. In the Book of Revelation, Jesus says to one of the churches:
"I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth."
It sure sounds from this quote like Jesus would be happier with a society divided between serious Christians, and committed nonbelievers (especially if the latter are genuinely trying to follow the truth); rather than a society full of lots of nominal Christians who show up every week because that is the socially respectable thing to do.
It's true there are some real benefits from more people being exposed to Christian ideas in a "Christian" culture. But, real examples of such cultures are inevitably still heavily influenced by worldliness and avarice, traits that are quite incompatible with genuine Christian ethics. In a Christian flavored culture, the fact that Christianity is socially "approved", and therefore accepted by the rich and famous, may actually make it more difficult to acquire an authentic spirituality. In some ways it is harder to follow the "narrow way" marked out by the gospel, when the broad road is also labelled as "Christianity"!
As you say, there are some advantages on both sides. But, if the choice ever comes down to a society in which Christians are persecuted, or a society in which Christians do the persecuting---while I'd rather have neither!---it seems obviously more in accordance with the spirit of Christ's teaching to pick being persecuted. There are lots of supposed Christians out there talking online about how they definitely would use the Ring of Power to dominate the bad guys, if they ever got it. Fortunately, they aren't very likely to get it. (For example, it is always amusing to see online integralists debating whether they *should* turn America into an officially Catholic society, as if that were on option on the table. But, lots of Protestant evangelical forms of this as well.)
Exposure in cultural Christianity is often a perversion of Christian beliefs, e.g. Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, or blue laws.
I often think about an episode of the sitcom "Step By Step" from the early 90s where the dad doesn't want to go to church because he'd rather watch football (The Simpsons had an episode around the same time in a similar vein). Eventually he reluctantly attends church but sneaks off to the attic to watch, ending with him crashing through the ceiling in the middle of the sermon. That seems representative of cultural Christianity in the 90s. We can draw a line directly from that to where we are today.
I definitely think people are free riding on the religiosity of others. Perhaps it would help if we framed it with the Chinese Confucian concept of Li. Ritual, etiquette, propriety are loose translations for a concept that reminds me of "manners on steroids". Society has a bunch of arcane rules and procedures, from TSA to job interviews to therapy reports to (in some places) addressing adults in a particular way. Perhaps you don't know why these rules exist. But as a good Confucian, you accept them and try to tie your soul to them for they are part of li. In order to play your role, you need li. What li does for society, according to Xunzi, is that it ensures a harmony of action among all parties. It is the set of ritual actions and expectations for behavior that makes society lower cost to navigate, because the decision has been made for you.
In the western context, we might call it piety: best personified by Aeneas fleeing Troy with his father and household gods on his back, and son in his hand. There may exist a set of beliefs and attitudes and rituals which makes society tick and preserve its culture. Piety is a real thing like justice. A type of honor paid to the values of a society, rather than cynicism or hypercritical readings.
Christian culture cannot be replaced by beloved 1890s progressive irreligious culture, because that era, much as I love it, does not provide a full set of answers for how to live. It is not a practice of a community. Sure there was Bloomsbury, but it was low fertility. If their number John Maynard Keynes echoed the same view you dislike, "We had the best of both worlds. We destroyed Christianity and yet had its benefits." Maybe he was being hyperbolic, but there is something to it.
I think that that something is this. Christian religons provide a framework and in practice many, many details for how to live life well and virtuously. In the streets Christianity can be liberal, but rarely in the sheets. There it is particular. For while the very intelligent and wealthy recover from vice pretty easily -they snap out of addictions, an extramarital affair won't leave them destitute, and alcoholism tends to be functional - for normal people, for children, and for those lacking in natural and secular advantages, Christian religion provides a thicker moral safety net to pull them out of self-destructive tendencies. It provides li.
All major religions probably also serve a function like this, and so you have to judge which network of li obligations you like best or lead to the best results. But if most people are shedding the old rituals and NOT replacing them with new useful or beautiful manners, then you might look at the live options available and shout, "Christianity!"
That's the value of being culturally Christian. You accept some amount of Christian li, and in exchange you get the benefits of the li being taught to the next generation. It is possible to assess Christian cultural norms, decide they are really good, and promote them without yourself subscribing the Nicene Creed. That's not hypocritical! But someone has to run the institutions which teach and instantiate those values.
Shouldn't you point out one aspect of culture that a) pre-christian b) desirable
I'm of the opinion humanity is growing layers of mental complexity culturally(cave man art sux, children seem to need to watch adults talking to learn complex grammer, accounts of extreme neglect/raised by animals children reporting different animalistic mental states as adults)
I've heard claims that Christianity spread the idea time in linear and that ideal forms can physically exist; these are fairly important claims for the modern world that as far as I know no one modern credibly disagrees. I'm fairly unclear what it's like to talk to a uncontacted tribes that hasn't yet made a full number system, but isn't such concept propagation obviously true(assuming evolution) even if hard to empathize with. I will never know what it's like to not have been exposed to the concept of zero since being new born, but entire ancient writing systems didn't have such a concept nailed down to say nothing of uncontacted tribes with "1,2,many" numbers
Who says you have to assert Christian doctrine? I openly say I do not believe it, but that I am "pro-Christian" and I miss many things about it.
I recognize it's part of western identity and history, I acknowledge the value of it, and I do not go around asserting that (say) Islam is just as good or better because it's foreign. I don't try to deconvert Christians and I support the priviledged display of Christian symbols and traditions in the west, rather than the notion that all religions are of equal cultural and historical significance here.
I don't think cultural Christianity can dissolve into Woke because it isn't a real religion. Maybe it needs a nucleus of real Christians to operate (and one day that will run out), and maybe it just buys time.
grab bag of a notion to denote modernity/ modernism, while at the same time purporting to link it to a specific time (how about place - Germany, UK, France, Russia, the US??), that there is no hope for deriving any meaningful analysis from these premises.
An allegory: In a certain village, the people gathered fish bones and mingled them with their soil, believing this would summon the spirits of the fish to bless their crops. For many years, their fields flourished more abundantly than any in the land. With this prosperity, the villagers found more time for contemplation, and in their contemplation, they slowly ceased to believe in the fish spirits. Eventually, they discontinued their ancient practice of enriching the soil with fish bones. For a time, the earth remained fertile, yielding bountiful harvests. Yet, as seasons passed, the land grew weary and barren. The wise elders among them counseled a return to the old ways, hoping to revive the tired soil. But a certain scribe, renowned among the people, persuaded them otherwise, arguing that it was this very practice of bone mixing that had brought them to their current plight. The villagers, swayed by his words, diligently tried other methods while the land continued to languish.
He who hath ears to hear, let him hear! I also disagree Scott’s implicit claim that Christianity inevitably “led” to our current state of affairs and therefore cannot be the needed solution.
I'm not sure whether you're being glib here, but I'll take this idea and run with it: The problem is that performing the motions and clinging to superstition stunts your growth. Mixing in fish bones is *the right action*, sure, but the lack of understanding is what led to their downfall, and clinging to the myth of fish spirits prevents them from seeing other ways their goal can be achieved, like using fertiliser.
That would require an understanding of the scientific method, and by that point you've gone past blind superstition.
And the modern equivalent would require a common understanding of "flourishing", which I highly doubt is possible. (I think it's possible to have a common understanding of withering though.)
Great points—I didn’t intend the allegory to suggest that Ye Olde Christendom was the optimal society or that superstition is desirable. It was specifically meant to critique Scott’s claim that because we "already tried Christian culture," which purportedly eventually led to today’s problems, it isn’t a viable set of practices to reconsider. Perhaps other factors and forces, which we didn’t understand at the time, contributed to cultural decline rather than the culture itself. Now, we see that we are missing something that we didn’t appreciate before. Not returning to it because of the claim that somehow “caused” today’s problems seems silly to me.
One issue I have with this analogy is that I don’t think Christendom was a better place to live than anywhere else for most of its history. It wasn’t until the Reformation-era wars subsided and secularism was arrived at as a compromise that the West starts to show signs of pulling ahead. And in particular, I think post-Enlightenment West was much better than the pre-Enlightenment West. But secularism and the Enlightenment are *precisely* what set us on the road to modern, irreligious society.
So the society that *may* be worth going back to (post-Enlightenment Christianity) has never shown itself to be a stable state
The West already had the highest GDP per capita by 1400 or so, a good century before the Reformation; and of course, it was on the cusp of the Age of Exploration (conventionally dated to 1415), which directly led to its becoming dominant over the rest of the world. It wasn't yet as decisively far ahead as it would later become, but it certainly was showing signs of pulling ahead.
Interesting - I didn't know this about GDP but Wikipedia seems to corroborate it, more or less. Let me amend "starts to show signs of pulling ahead" to "starts to show signs of developing into a society that *actually* adheres to the values that I want to uphold - liberty, freedom of speech, equality, etc."
Basically:
* Pre-enlightenment Christianity was stable but not good compared to modern society
* Enlightenment is when things start to get good, but enlightenment basically sowed the seeds of Christianity's decline
So I don't see any previous version of Christian society that has *both* of the following characteristics:
1. Reason to think it is stable enough to avoid sliding into [whatever it is we don't like about modern secular society]
2. Has superior values to modern society (which for all its faults actually takes liberty, equality, and freedom of speech much more seriously than the vast majority of historical Christian societies)
GDP per capita was higher in Europe than other parts of the world in 1400 because the Bubonic plague had just killed 1/3 of the population and left the survivors with a lot more farmland per capita. Most of Europe then saw a decline in per capita GDP as population recovered.
I always see people making the "cultural Christianity argument" from the opposite direction; in socjus-infested spaces like Tumblr, "cultural Christianity" is infamously a buzzword used by religious non-Christians to suggest that atheists are evil subversive Western crypto-Christians.
That’s a technological advance, rather than a moral awakening. Chlorpromazine was discovered in the 1950s. Up until then, asylums were the only option.
Honestly, it's a pretty direct line from Plato to Augustine to Descartes to Le Corbusier, all united in their elevation of the abstract and universal over the concrete and the particular. I'd think paganism and Whitman and Nietzsche are closer to whatever cultural threads produced art nouveau, if you wanted to map things this way, and those are the threads I'd be looking to pick up.
Seth Bullow and I debated this very issue in ninth grade, @1970. His position was that people needed to believe in hell because it was the only way to prevent everybody from killing each other. I said people did not have to be afraid of an ultimate punishment to behave. He was conservative and I was/am reform. I heard that after college he made alyiah and moved to Israel
This argument doesn't make much sense to me. (As a pretty hardcore atheist who doesn't value Cultural Christianity.)
In general, if we predict a movement from X to Y, and we value X, then we should keep promoting X. We should do this _even if our efforts at doing so have not yet offset the inexorable slide toward Y_. If we stopped promoting X, then we would slide toward Y even faster! And maybe, if we just promote X hard enough, we'll rally more and more to our cause, and shift the direction of movement back toward X. One key element of doing that might be creating a new intellectual synthesis, where former Y-partisans recognize the value of X.
This holds whether we take X = Christianity and Y = modernism, or X = conservativism and Y = liberalism ("Cthulhu swims left"), or X = small government and Y = big government, or X = good housing policy and Y = bad housing policy.
> And maybe, if we just promote X hard enough, we'll rally more and more to our cause, and shift the direction of movement back toward X.
But all this does is create a larger and larger potential energy for the eventual slide into Y, right? If we define F as the force by which X is cultivated, and G as the rate at which X degenerates into Y: what is the evidence that F is not completely overwhelmed by G every single time, on a sufficient time scale?
All the adults are non-Christian, but all the children are sent to Sunday school. The children are educated, rigorously, while the adults do whatever they want on Sunday morning.
When the children turn eighteen, they are disillusioned, on purpose. No Santa at five, no Christ at eighteen.
A lot of them get blackout drunk for two months straight.
But none of them can shake the work ethic of Calvinism, or the community building of Lutheranism, or the world building drive of Baptism, or the pacifism of the Quakers, or the drive to order and preservation of the Catholics. None of them can upend all the thousand little moral teachings in their hearts, or forget the enormous collection of Christian art.
As adults, they join in a sort of rational agnostic world which is tolerant of many things but quite firm on the dangers of a whole society growing up without these foundations, quite firm in its defense of the child practice, pointing to a society like ours (maybe in their past, maybe in another part of the world) as their evidence. Many of these new adults agree, many bow to pressure, most continue the practice of Sunday Schools, enjoying their own Sunday mornings with a quiet guilt, and WEIRD continues.
Note that many, many things actually do work this way. Consider how anything at all was taught to children in the US or Russia around 1912, or 1952. Wasn't there a significant gap between what the children were taught, and what sophisticated adults privately believed? This gap was, maybe, stable, and then we poked it to death.
This hypothetical is why I, a formerly angry lapsed Catholic agnostic, happily let my in-laws take my daughters to Sunday School. I'm serious, no fooling.
A virtue must be defended on its own merits, and this is something Christians should already know. You don't go to mass on Sunday and "love thy neighbor" falls out of that naturally. You have to practice and drill and refine the principle the other 6 days of the week.
Equally, if you value liberal norms, you have to practice and defend them specifically. If you rely on religion to do it for you without putting any effort into the fight, you'll end up at illiberal religious dark ages. Religion doesn't make you a good person. Ideally it's a catalyst if you focus your efforts on change, but let's not pretend it's a magic pill that makes everything better on its own.
Jesus was a real, historical figure. Moses, Buddha and Mohammad were too.
The reason their stories persist to this day is because each of them became enlightened. They transcended the cares of this world and showed us the way to something beyond.
You can believe in God, or not, but the truth is the truth and it will find you. This applies to humans, societies, nations.
If you have sinned, lay it at the feet of Jesus and you will be forgiven.
He loves us so much that he died for us. He was resurrected, and sits at the right hand of the Father to judge the living and the dead.
I see people who are going to die every day. None of them talk about money. They all talk about love, their family, and God.
We live in biblical times. I pray, by the grace of God, may this world know peace.
Moses very likely wasn't historical - for one thing, the Exodus isn't a historical event, even when stripped of the supernatural bits. Wikipedia:
"The consensus of modern scholars is that the Pentateuch does not give an accurate account of the origins of the Israelites, who appear instead to have formed as an entity in the central highlands of Canaan in the late second millennium BCE (around the time of the Late Bronze Age collapse) from the indigenous Canaanite culture.[1][2][3] Most modern scholars believe that some elements in the story of the Exodus might have some historical basis, but that any such basis has little resemblance to the story told in the Pentateuch."
I've said before that I think this is the crux of rationality as formulated by Yudkowsky: truth-seeking vs. systematized winning. I have yet to see a proof that the two cannot come into conflict. IMO, humans have not had time to evolve to cope with all of the secondary effects of rational thought; what if we are indeed evolved to prefer a set of beliefs which, upon rational consideration, seem to be false? What if flourishing requires selective abandonment of truth?
But practically speaking: why does it need to be a new package? Can't we just say "we tried it this way and everything fell apart, so let's go back to doing it the old way"? Who is to say the degeneration was inevitable, as opposed to the result of contingent forces being applied, which can in turn be unapplied?
Or perhaps as the Buddhists say, we're living in the Latter Days of the Law.
> faith is the belief that what is good and what is true are the same
I like that formulation. It might be slightly undercut by the belief in an afterlife containing individualized desserts, thus ensuring "winning". But then, as I argued elsewhere in the thread, the point isn't to establish earthly paradise by any means necessary, it's to cultivate virtuous souls. And not defined by some purely internal metric, but with deliberate attention to interpersonal interaction.
I think there's a deeply rooted human instinct to turn back the "cultural clock" when society has gone awry, and revert to the old ways. We call it "conservatism". When I'm feeling optimistic, I imagine this instinct will take us back to 20th C. modernism, and give us another chance to do it right & in a way that is sustainable. Maybe soon it will be possible to be both a progressive and a conservative without any cognitive dissonance.
When I'm feeling pessimistic, I think it's all just the "hard times make strong men" thing and we're doomed to bounce back and forth forever.
But if you don't like asserting false things, you should try Buddhism -- not as a philosophy, but as a religion. Some parts of it are hard to accept, such as reincarnation and karma, but they're at least plausible, and not really central aspects of the religion anyway. The other 90% of it is verifiably true, based on your own direct experience, and the system of morality is remarkably similar to the Abrahamic religions (don't kill/lie/steal etc.)
I think the major arguments in favor of swallowing one's principles and going through the motions of Christianity or some other religious system all stem form the fact that without unifying belief systems it's very hard, especially for elites, to identify broadly acceptable mechanisms for signalling that they're part of a larger cross-class group (through the "costly displays" mechanism). Without buy-in, institutions encouraging impersonal pro-sociality weaken, setting off a vicious cycle of institutional degradation. Without social institutions worth controlling the elites just move on to enriching themselves with cash, which in turn enables conspicuous consumption for wealth (rather than belonging) signalling, which further weakens social institutions, hurting the ability of technocratic elites to launder institutional trust into solutions to real problems (vaccines are possibly the most recent prominent example of this sort of failure cascade).
Haven't we unified in the past under the belief system of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" i.e. the American way of life? Or does that signal degrade without the shared sacrifice of war?
The wars probably helped in that regard but it's also worth remembering that the mid-20th century was extremely thick with intermediary institutions, religious institutions were just the most deeply embedded since they served as hubs for multigenerational immigrant communities.
There's not as much social science here as I'd like in order to have confidence in this view, but there is a fairly large literature on social trust, and much of it springs from shared membership (or shared membership within a small degree of removal); i.e. - I may not be a Rotarian (or Catholic, or Jew), but since my friend from my church is part of the same Rotary club that you are and he'd never complained about anyone there, I can implicitly trust you because you are, in a sense, pre-vetted.
So my view here is less a defense of "cultural Christianity" per se than it is an argument for building robust, cross-class intermediary institutions, and religious institutions outlasted the others (with the exception of some sports fandoms).
However, it's possible that religion itself has been so thoroughly discredited throughout the West that it's not a stable basis for institution-building anymore.
and that pre-vetting works both ways .. and leads to cancellation, ostracism etc, (unrelated to what I see described as “wokism” ) its just tribalism isn’t it?
The cynical answer is that it's tribalism the whole way down, and I'm less confident that it's not than I wish I was. I'm also not confident that there's a better solution within the bounds of large-scale social psychology.
If you adopt that kind of social psychology as a constraint, there is (in my estimation) a pretty compelling argument for communities to get good at identifying their internal, "petty" elites, and for those elites to understand that they bear an obligation to the communities that selected them. Given the psychological constraints, I don't really see a way forward without intermediary institutions.
a) I'd argue that those values are downstream from Christianity ("that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights"), and we never had a better way of grounding them other than simple assertion.
b) I'd say that we're losing sight of them, despite all the smaller wars we've had since WWII. And the potential of WWIII seems like it would harm civilization more than help it, so "engage in another total war" can't be the answer.
Have you ever read any Christian philosophers like Edward Feser? I ask as the more rationalist type atheists find the Aristotle Aquinas logic more thought provokong { ie is any of the religion stuff actually true } or at the every least it makes one question a lot of metaphysical premises the 'it's just science all the way down' types usually are unaware they rely on
Is pragmatism what cultural Christianity is all about? I confess that I'm a novice, but when I recently came across the notion I was almost instantly converted, not because it seemed expedient but because it seemed true. The English language, my mother tongue, is shot through with biblical and specifically Christian allusions ("confess", "novice", "converted"); we observe Easter and Christmas (and the Sabbath somewhat); we sing Handel's Messiah at Easter and carols at Christmas; we talk about pilgrimages and epiphanies; we turn the other cheek, refrain from casting the first stone and intone "greater love hath no man than this"; we call each other doubting Thomases, distribute loaves and fishes and accuse upstarts of thinking they can walk on water. We know what is meant when Brian's mother scolds, "He's not the Messiah. He's just a very naughty boy!" Furthermore, I approve, on the whole, of New Testament teachings, such as the injunction to forgive seventy times seven. What is more, traditional churches are beautiful. I want to see them preserved, not as museum pieces or tourist sights, but as meeting places for people who want to come together to celebrate their fellowship, observe quaint traditions and sing.
I find the cultural Christianity argument very convincing, but not quite in the terms Scott describes here, and more as an analytical tool than as a concrete proposal for change.
Here's the argument as I understand it: Christianity has shaped our society for a really long time. Most of our ideals and values have been heavily influenced or mediated by Christianity. We usually don't notice this because we're so used to our own values. For example, we consider the principle of equal human rights to be self-evident, and not an inheritance from Galatians 3:28, while the rights of animals are still up for debate. In reality, without Christianity we are adrift on Nietzsche's open seas (and that's [good|scary]).
I am not and will never be a Christian, but I suppose I can see how you would go from there to "...and therefore we should re-embrace Christianity" on conservative grounds.
> Only 10% of Israeli Jews are ultra-Orthodox, and it would be lower if they didn't breed so fast
This one is unlike the others on the list: Israel started as a secular project with almost no ultraOrthodox at all, and their numbers as a proportion of the population have been steadily growing (mostly because, as you note, they breed so fast). Israel actually ends up being fairly close to a steady state partly-religious society for this reason (see also your linked article about Israeli fertility from a few weeks ago).
So the cultural Judaism actually is a good question - I broadly dislike the state support for religion (especially enforcing no public transit or services on the Sabbath, but also helping them stay insulated by giving them special welfare and exemption from conscription). But if it helps the country stay at a somewhat steady just-post-religious state, with less woke/more casual culture/no fertility crisis, it might be a trade worth making.
(Sadly, we've never had any beautiful architecture in Israel at all).
Well, we've definitely never had a period where beautiful architecture was the norm (we moved straight from postwar construction with cheap ugly materials to modernism, and not especially nice kinda of modernism). There are some pretty buildings around (and personally I like the Jerusalem thing of covering every building in stone), but we never had a classic pretty architecture period.
Well, Jews in Israel did arguably have such a period, but it was in the 1400s in Tzfat, (Safed,) then in the early 1800s in Jerusalem - but much of this was lost or destroyed.
My biggest problem with how we talk about cultural Christianity (and our Judeo-Christian legacy more broadly), is that it so heavily discounts the Greco-Roman and Germanic cultural contributions (and even more ancient cultural roots), it takes credit for ideas that are common across humanity, and it disregards the degree to which Christianity has repeatedly been a huge obstacle to moral, political and scientific progress, rather than a driving force.
(In almost exactly the same way that dogmatic and violent Islamism is today, BTW – murdering heretics, spreading God’s word through blood and conquest, propping up dictators and authoritarian regimes, shutting down intellectual inquiry and discourse, oppressing large swaths of people, even going to war over the same stretch of land.)
Obviously, it’s impossible to completely disentangle the complete legacy of Christianity from modern Westernized culture, and I am not denying that Christianity has made positive contributions, too. (Though, the non-Christian world also has impressive architecture, art and music, so let’s not ascribe too much of that to a belief in a particular book.) It would be weird if it were *all* negative. But it should be obvious to anyone who looks at how we got here with half an honest and open mind, that so much of what we are, we are *despite* Christianity – because parallel strands of culture won out – not because of it.
<i>My biggest problem with how we talk about cultural Christianity (and our Judeo-Christian legacy more broadly), is that it so heavily discounts the Greco-Roman and Germanic cultural contributions (and even more ancient cultural roots), it takes credit for ideas that are common across humanity, and it disregards the degree to which Christianity has repeatedly been a huge obstacle to moral, political and scientific progress, rather than a driving force.</i>
I am sure you are able to think of some influential Greek philosophers, some ancient Greek myths, arts, or literature that have helped shape our culture all the way down to our language. Likewise, you shouldn’t need much help to see some parallels between the Roman republic and the political and judicial system in the US – or some Roman influence in our calendar and the names of our months. The influence of the Germanic tribes may be harder to see (as they weren’t as prolific writers or masons), but through everything from the myths and fairy tales we share, to the names of the days that remind us of those myths, it has trickled down to us, and taught us an ethic of relative individualism and egalitarianism that is distinct from that of peoples elsewhere. It goes deeper than just ideas; it’s memes woven into daily life.
It’s not that these memes don’t exist in other cultures, or even in aspects of Christianity (the themes are often archetypical and universal), but that if you strip away any individual’s faith, and leave only the stories, our perspective is as flavored and colored by the stories of Narcissus and Sisyphus, the thinking of Aristotle and Socrates, the musings of Marcus Aurelius and oratory of Cicero, or the myths of Beowulf and of Odin, as it is by the life of Jesus of Nazareth and St. Paul. Even our version of Christianity itself is largely shaped by cultural practices from our ancestors before Christianity got to them. This is why there are Christmas trees, Easter bunnies, and Halloween costumes, and it probably goes some way toward explaining why parts of the Bible resonate so deeply, whereas other parts are easy for us to ignore.
Is this meant to be a reply to me? Because it doesn't really answer my question. I asked for specific ideas that get ascribed to Christianity but which are actually "common across humanity", not for vague generalities about the Greeks and Romans being influential, which nobody denies.
<i>It’s not that these memes don’t exist in other cultures, or even in aspects of Christianity (the themes are often archetypical and universal), but that if you strip away any individual’s faith, and leave only the stories, our perspective is as flavored and colored by the stories of Narcissus and Sisyphus, the thinking of Aristotle and Socrates, the musings of Marcus Aurelius and oratory of Cicero, or the myths of Beowulf and of Odin, as it is by the life of Jesus of Nazareth and St. Paul.</i>
It really isn't. Tom Holland's "Dominion" does a good job of explaining how our beliefs derive from Christianity, not pre-Christian paganism.
<i>This is why there are Christmas trees, Easter bunnies, and Halloween costumes,</i>
Those things (a) are pretty superficial compared to moral and metaphysical beliefs, and (b) aren't attested until hundreds of years after Christianisation and have no evidence linking them to pre-Christian pagan customs.
You’re right; I wasn’t specific enough. That’s fair. Some examples:
• I first noticed this when I was quite young. I was taught in school that The Golden Rule was a Christian thing, but found out from other sources that versions of it are common and predate Christianity.
• There are all the mythological tropes sprinkled throughout both the old and New Testament: The flood, the virgin birth, the return from the dead …
• More relevant, however, people often suggest some strong causal link between Christianity and concepts that are important to me, like egalitarianism, democracy, human rights, equality under god (≈ the law), etc., but they don’t get very specific about the connection. Usually it’s some suggestion about how Jesus made us individually responsible beings, answerable only to God and ourselves, whereas we used to be just … I dunno, sheep? I don’t see it, as I see plenty of signs of those things prior to Jesus. But they will argue that those things wouldn’t have been possible without Christianity. While I can admit that Christianity has shaped their current, Western-style manifestation, since they last re-emerged in a Christian context in Europe, I think it is much easier to find the seed of those ideas in the humanism of the ancient Greeks (democracy) and Romans (rule of law, etc). And there are clear signs that variations of those ideas (basic freedoms and equality) have been common (not universal) among peoples across the world since before the earliest civilizations.
• Elsewhere in this comment section someone seems to suggests that the Enlightenment would not have happened without Christianity, because the Reformation was instrumental in bringing it about. I don’t agree with the premise or the way the argument is made. I think we would have gotten to the enlightenment sooner without the reactionary Catholic Church holding its foot on the neck of free thought, speech and inquiry. The reformation and printing press simply took some of the weight off of that foot.
(The vagueness with which Christian Culture is given outsized credit for good things in Western tradition is typical, though. It often shifts the burden of proof: The people who did x were Christian, so obviously they did it because they were Christian. Don’t agree? Prove me wrong.)
Next: Tom Holland is good with history, but not so unbiased on Christianity, so his opinion carries little weight for me on this.
Finally: A) We’re not talking about metaphysics, but explicitly about _cultural_ Christianity. Holidays are as cultural as it gets. B) I mean, the etymology of Easter and Yule alone go some ways here, but if there’s something in the Bible about egg-laying bunnies, I’ll accept that it’s probably a Christian invention, and not brought in from some other culture.
The Greeks and Romans certainly didn't believe in egalitarianism or human rights. Some societies, like Athens, supported (at least in principle) legal equality *for citizens*, but there was no sense that *people in general* were or ought to be equal. Even in Athens, women and slaves were denied political rights, and of course the equality-loving Athenians were happy to conquer and enslave other city-states when they got the chance. As for rule of law, the Romans absolutely held rich, important people to a different standard to everybody else. In one trial I happened to be reading about recently, the defendant, a famous senator called Aemilius Scaurus, literally stood before the jury and said "Varius Severus [the prosecutor, a man of no reputation] of Sucro [an insignificant Roman colony in Spain] says that Aemilius Scaurus took a bribe; Aemilius Scaurus denies it. Whom do you believe?" and that was enough to get him acquitted.
That's not to say that the ancients had no concept whatsoever of equality or rule of law, or even that there weren't a few people who believed in the concepts in forms we'd recognise. But on a societal level, they didn't.
<i> think we would have gotten to the enlightenment sooner without the reactionary Catholic Church holding its foot on the neck of free thought, speech and inquiry.</i>
So why didn't China, or India, or the Islamic world get their first? They didn't have to deal with the Catholic boot stamping on a humanist face the way Europeans had to.
<i>Finally: A) We’re not talking about metaphysics, but explicitly about _cultural_ Christianity. Holidays are as cultural as it gets.</i>
We're talking about ideas and values, which are usually downstream of metaphysics.
<i>B) I mean, the etymology of Easter and Yule alone go some ways here,</i>
Most European languages don't use cognates of Easter and Yule to designate those festivals. (English doesn't even use "Yule", except in more poetic contexts where obscure words are more accepted.)
<i>but if there’s something in the Bible about egg-laying bunnies, I’ll accept that it’s probably a Christian invention, and not brought in from some other culture.</i>
False dichotomy. Something can be a Christian invention without being brought in from another culture. Christmas trees, for example, are first attested in the sixteenth century, and seem originally to have been a Lutheran practice -- and, last I checked, Lutheranism is a branch of Christianity.
> The Greeks and Romans certainly didn't believe in egalitarianism or human rights.
For the vast majority of the history of Christian Europe, aristocrats clearly did not believe in egalitarianism or human rights.
> Even in Athens, women and slaves were denied political rights
> As for rule of law, the Romans absolutely held rich, important people to a different standard to everybody else.
This seems pretty consistent with most of the history of Christendom too. Even granting that things got better after the Enlightenment (and granting that Christianity paved the way for the Enlightenment), it seems equally dubious to credit Christianity for equality or political rights for women.
The way I see it, the de-Christianization of society was basically inevitable after the Enlightenment, but it wasn't until the Enlightenment that the West really had the values worth preserving, so re-emphasizing Christianity is unlikely to help.
I’m making the point that non-Christian cultural influences are not given enough credit when certain people (particularly Christians) talk about the cultural heritage, that has brought us liberalism, capitalism, impressive scientific and technological progress, etc. Pedantically arguing and getting bogged down in the details of my examples is not engaging with that argument seriously.
It just gets weird when you admit Greek and Roman influence, and then retreat into positions like Athens wasn’t perfectly democratic, rule of law in Rome was flawed, and China’s golden ages of cultural and technological progress don’t count because reasons I didn’t quite understand …
None of that brings us much closer to proving that Christianity’s influence is not overrated.
Instead of quarreling about the role of evergreens in celebrating the winter solstice, you’ll have a much better chance at convincing me if you can make a good case for Judeo-Christian tradition in fact being more important than Greco-Roman and other pagan culture (or at least more important than you think I give it credit for) in shaping the best parts of modern, Western culture: Liberalism, capitalism, humanism, and periods of remarkable scientific and technological progress. Where in Christian tradition does the meat of those ideas come from?
"I am no fan of medieval theocracy. But I do have a weakness for the 1880 - 1930 period of fin de siecle culture, Art Nouveau, economic liberty, and progressophilia."
Only an American could write those sentences, as if nothing significant happened in 1914.
One could argue that, in America, it really did end in 1929. And that in Europe, it may have died in 1914, but the corpse didn't start to decay for another decade or two, depending on the location. I'm no expert, but the art and literature I've seen indicates to me that, while there was a lot of angst and soul-searching, there was also a lot of trying to pretend that everything was still fine and nothing had changed.
Good analogy! One-two punch of WW1 and the Depression. And I take your point about different experience in Europe and America. It wasn’t such a small world then.
Two thoughts to overcome those directional problems:
- why not only consider things at equilibrium? fair enough this never occurred in the past 150 years, so either we don't draw conclusions or we go back discussing Antiquity
- why not consider things with the horizon of your generation, in this case something that goes bad after two generations should not matter so much (sorry kids, your turn to figure out what you want to pass forward)
I tend to agree that a critical mass needs to believe Christianity is true in order to get the downstream positive effects. But a less hostile non-Christian culture seems like a win-win, slowing the decline of actual belief (and any remaining positive effects) while we await either RETVRN or a credible successor.
Accepting that the 1890s through 1930s were a cultural high point, is the claim that this was caused specifically by the decay of Christian belief? Were recently ex-christians over represented among artists, or was it the jostling of believers against unbelievers in the right proportion that brought it about?
>The "cultural Christianity" argument says that atheists might not like Christianity, but they like a culture which depends on Christianity. They like open, free, thoughtful, liberal, beautiful, virtuous societies.
> Unmoored from a connection to Christanity, a society will gradually have less of those goods, until even atheists are unhappy.
I fully believe the first part but not the second.
I think modern Western values are evolved from Christian values. Doesn't mean Christian values ain't outdated. But they were uniquely good and progressive for their time. And I don't like when people deny that the Enlightenment grew out as a product of Reformation, and that modern values that have now spread around the world are Christian values' descendants
> And I don't like when people deny that the Enlightenment grew out as a product of Reformation.
Let’s say you’re straightforwardly right. Would you deny that the Reformation and its success across Europe (where previous would-be reformers had failed) in significant part grew out as a product of the Renaissance (a return to ancient, pre-Christian Greek and Roman values), and of technological advancement (primarily the printing press), and not just from ideas intrinsic to Christianity?
Would you deny that the purpose of the Reformation was to reform a Christian church that had for centuries been allowed to be corrupt and greedy, systematically torturing and murdering dissidents, supporting authoritarianism and opposing any hint of democratization, egging on wars and crusades? That was the culture of Christianity at the time (and for a long time after).
The point is that the Reformation was hardly a natural continuation of Christianity as it was going, but a strong reaction to what it had become, driven forward by ideas and possibilities that came from both inside and outside Christianity, but are not critical parts of Christianity as history until that point proved.
If you want to claim that the culture carried forward by Christianity has been a force for good, you need to include all of Christianity in that, as well as give credit for both good and bad things to non-Christian influences where such credit is due.
The Roman Empire adopted Christianity in 313 AD. It then took 1400 years before we hit the Enlightenment, which some Christians want the credit for. But that seems like an awful long gestation period, and I don't think there's any evidence that the Catholic church was actively aiming for anything like the Enlightenment. Maybe with a weaker church it would have come sooner.
So I would say, in order to produce beautiful art, you have to have a more playful relationship with reality than hard-core rationalism/empiricism allows, and this playful relationship is often the effect of all manner of Woo. If you're worried that someone will think your incomplete picture of reality is a "steaming pile" (to quote one commenter) you probably won't back yourself to get over writer's block.
Having said that I enjoyed Unsong and have always liked Douglas Adams.
I would disagree-cultural Christianity acts as a kind of check and balance-it gets in the way of religious extremism and prevents the anarchy that follows atheism-the question of is god real or not is irrelevant because we will never identify what caused the Big Bang in the first place, we can only surmise and at the end of the day that’s not proof-besides perhaps god is the energy force of the universe and your soul is part of that energy force making us all part of the universe and therefore god-either way it doesn’t matter-what does matter is maintaining a liberal society based upon Christian values and cultural Christianity would seem to be the best way
Cultural Christianity follows the Zeitgeist, and as it jettisons the supernatural (to avoid shocking modern sensibilities), it becomes more and more irrelevant. Why bother being involved in something which already agrees with "the current thing"? You can do that just fine without being a member of a church.
Traditional churches are also getting the same fallout where people are just not bothering to turn up or get involved, and those remaining are probably cultural (it's the custom to get married in church, buried in church, and attend for Christmas and Easter, but belief doesn't really have any part to play in everyday life) and will diminish.
We may indeed see Christianity dry up and wither away in the West. What comes after, though, is indeed a question the secular should be seriously considering: making SCIENCE! the new god is not going to keep things going after the energy of 'things as we do them' runs out, and there is now the vacancy for 'what new system of ethical and moral and philosophical understanding will we adopt as the basis on which we make laws and treat others?'
Maybe you pin your hopes on some version of Utilitarianism and try to convince the world at large to adopt "the greatest good of the greatest number", but once you've finally kicked away "love your neighbour as yourself" and "who is my neighbour? everyone is your neighbour" and burned up the last vestiges of that idea, you better be pretty damn convincing to the people who ask "why the hell should I worry about other people's happiness or good? the rule is Look Out For Number One and that's me, baby!"
"We should be concerned about everyone" has its roots ultimately in "God created us and we are all equal in His eyes". The religion-free counter to that is "There's no God, nature created us. and we're not equal because see genetics; thus I *am* better, qualitatively, than him and I therefore have more rights than him and more right to have the good things".
I mean, we've *had* these arguments on here, and I don't mean the tired old accusation of HBD is racism: we've had discussions about 'some populations have more of beneficial traits than others' and discussions about embryonic selection to have better babies and 'more IQ always gooder' and the whole nine yards about "everyone is equal is nonsense; some people are clearly and indisputably smarter, or more beautiful, or more athletic, or more creative, or less violent and aggressive, less criminal, than others. there should be a baseline standard for who counts as 'human' or not, and those who fall below it don't have rights. there is no such thing as natural rights anyway'.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
For a lot of modern people, these are not 'truths', they are not self-evident, and there is no Creator to endow anyone with anything, and rights are not inalienable.
Root out the very last vestiges of the values system which formed our culture, and then I genuinely and sincerely wish you good luck in creating and establishing a replacement that won't degenerate into "might makes right and we have got the Gatling gun and they have not".
The poem you are quoting in your last line was written by a Catholic, and relative to modern sensibilities extremely-Christian medieval and early modern Europe was extremely far along the "might makes right" side of things, so Christianity certainly doesn't strike me as a reliable or effective bulwark against this attitude.
Man, I'm glad I'm not a classical liberal any more.(or any other kind of liberal). Those were hard times, seeing how many forces were arrayed against my ideology, and feeling hopeless to do anything about it.
These are grim times indeed for a classical liberal.
(1) Christianity was dominant in Europe from the late Roman Empire to the eighteenth century, or about 1500 years, give or take a few centuries. This is a very long period of time, and suggests that Christianity can form a stable civilisational equilibrium.
(2) Liberalism was dominant from around 1800 to 2015 or so, after which it was superseded by wokeness. This is a much shorter period of time, and suggests that liberalism has greater difficulty forming a stable equilibrium than Christianity does.
(3) By 1700, liberalism was already on the rise, even if it wasn't quite hegemonic yet, so I feel like it's cheating to say "If you went back to 1700s Christianity, it would still decay into liberalism", because you picked a point when the decay was already well advanced. If you turned the clock back to a period well before the rise of liberalism -- 1400, or 1000, or 500 -- the chances of liberalism again becoming dominant would I think be very slim.
(4) As others have pointed out, it's almost always liberal Christian denominations that have given way to wokeness, not traditionalist ones. You could argue that traditional Christianity is vulnerable to liberalism which in turn is vulnerable to wokeism, but traditional Christianity doesn't seem to be directly vulnerable to wokeism, at least not to anything like the degree liberalism is.
(5) Wokeism is, historically and philosophically, an outgrowth of liberalism. Liberalism believes that freedom of choice is key to the good life and that society should be organised on a principle of equality; wokeism is what you get when people realise that free choice and equality can be limited by social norms and biology as well as by explicit laws and regulations. This means that appealing to liberal principles is unlikely to hinder the rise of wokeness.
Also (6) If current trends continue, the people of pretty much every liberal country are on course to become hated minorities in their own homelands by the end of the century, if not earlier. Say what you want about Christendom, at least it wasn't actively suicidal in the way liberaldom is.
It's true that older forms of Christianity failed to stop the rise of wokeness and scores of dangerous predecessor ideologies. But the Cultural Christianity argument is not that the optimal form of Christianity is or could ever be invincible. The argument is closer to: "We saw what happened as a civilization when we all moved away from Optimal Christianity, so you as an individual need to do your part to move society closer to Optimal Christianity." We're all fans of Chesterton's Fence around here but we're also should be fans of Chesterton's Fencepost: if you want to have an old fencepost you need to paint it regularly. You can't just count on the old paint to last. Every generation has to renew it
My problem with this is that the correlation seems to have the wrong sign. Over the last three or four hundred years our lives have changed vastly, and mostly for the better. Very few of us would swap our lives in 2024 for lives in 1624, 1724, 1824 or even 1924. And during that time the influence of Christianity in our society and the power of Christian institutions over us has generally declined. If anything, it suggests we should welcome the waning of Christianity among us.
Would you make the same arguments about living in the non-Christian societies of 1624, 1724, 1824 or 1924? In which case what you are arguing about is "prosperity and advances in health care and modern conveniences" and not the religious or cultural basis of the society.
Would you prefer to live, in 1724, under the rule of the Qing dynasty in China or that of George I in Britain? The Kangxi Emperor seems to have presided over a period of peace and prosperity, so you might prefer that - but you can't really say that it was a time of scientific advancement as the West classes that. George's reign didn't do much *except* see the influence of the monarchy declining and that of parliamentary rule increased.
I don't think that we (I am UK based, so that might be a small we) are post Christian, so much as we are post Quaker. If this is so then the argument that we should go back to a Christianity in general is misplaced, but more Friends could be fun.
I think you might be overstating their influence. Liturgically, they are a world away from the average Brit's understanding of what Christian worship looks like. No bells & smells, no hymns - no president or communion. Songs of Praise it isn't.
In terms of looks yes, but in terms of education of, and attitudes towards, women, the welfare state, worker's rights, prisons, clothes (we 'all' wear dull clothes now) and the way that we use time productively are Quaker things. They are not really C of E.
For the cultural Christianity argument to have any persuasion at all, you need to admit the premise that culture is undergoing some kind of degeneration. Well, we're still healthier, better educated and more prosperous than ever. Art flourishes fractally and if what's in the mainstream isn't for you, you can easily find something that is. Meanwhile, every generation has its own version of wokeness and of those who feel with complete certainty that it will cause the downfall of society. The cultural Christianity argument is a foot soldier for the theocrats who would actually return us to Christian cultural domination, but societies historically become freer and more prosperous as they move away from religion. And this is a totally standard Enlightenment take that should have been here long before I arrived to make the 300somethingth comment.
I would put this question to you: why did the Enlightenment not happen in China or the Islamic world or Meso-America?
What was different to make it take root in European soil?
We've had this discussion with the review of "The Ballad of the White Horse". My good liberal fellows on here asking in all seriousness "Why did Alfred make a peace treaty with Guthrum? After his victory, why didn't he massacre all the Vikings?"
That's our freer, more prosperous society of today moving away from religion: why regard The Enemy as my neighbour? Kill him and be secure!
EDIT: Indeed, it's so not at all certain that the lovely shiny Enlightenment values automatically arise once we hit threshold X that people worry about AI alignment! If it were a natural truth that 'become sufficiently complex and this result pops up', we wouldn't have to be working on "can we teach the AI to align with our values", as that would happen just as the end result of Science And Progress. If we genuinely fear that an AI might decide to kill all humans, why do we think that? Why do we think that a created intelligence that is truly free of all contamination of religious belief would act in such a way?
"why did the Enlightenment not happen in China or the Islamic world or Meso-America?" A: the greatness of our philosophers, who either were out-and-out religious skeptics (e.g. Hume, Diderot) or tended to have extremely unorthodox religious views (e.g. Locke, Spinoza). I think it's pretty tendentious to claim victory for religion here.
Insufficient. Were there no atheist/materialist thinkers in China, India, or other non-Christian societies?
If your argument is "the force of religion there was too strong", then what made Christianity different, that it could be dissolved away? If there's nothing special about Christianity, then why did other cultures under other religions not also come to the same conclusions?
What did Baruch Spinoza do for STEM and creating economic value? Tell me his influence in persuading venture capitalists to invest in this upcoming project that will improve the world!
One thing that need to be addressed with this kind of argument (why did this happen in this place and not in another one) is that we would need to be able to make sure it wouldn’t truly happen in another place.
Suppose I give you two fair dices. You roll them only once: one rolls 6, the other rolls 2. Are we able to conclude that there is a unique trait on the first dice that allowed it to roll 6 instead of the other? No, we know in this situation that it was a simple matter of random chance: if we roll them again and again, we see that there is nothing special abaout any dice, they are equally able to roll 6.
Sure, reducing the complexities of society and history to the roll of a die is excessive, but the point is that there could be the possibility of our understanding being biased by the one single timeline we have to study.
There’s a corresponding argument against cultural Christianity - that it’s the root of wokeness, or a general culture of victimhood and pity-seeking - which I think also merits rebuttal. My (I guess contrarian?) opinion is that Christianity is far less influential than most people think, and hasn’t been very influential for a while. Both the best and worst aspects of western modernity are mostly explained by our wealth, technology, and reactions to certain historical events like the world wars, rather than by the ghost of Christianity. It’s actually closer to the truth that the last few generations of Christians are basically secular humanists who just wear the superficial ornamentation of a hollowed out religion than that modern secular people are unwitting Christians.
I find it really weird that your go-to summary for today's culture declining is "wokeness and postmodernism" as opposed to, say, nationalism, far-right populism, and demagoguery.
In the era of Trump, Putin, Xi, Modi, Le Pen, Netanyahu, Musk, Orban, AfD, et al, I know who to be scared of: left wing academics and civil service hiring managers!
Trump is opposed by almost all of the powerful institutions in US politics, and there's no guarantee he'll be re-elected.
Musk is a classical liberal more than anything else, and the fact that he's now considered "far-right" tells you a lot about how far left the US has shifted.
Putin, Xi, Modi, Le Pen, Netanyahu, Orban, and the AfD are all outside the US, so it makes sense for Scott, an American resident, to be less concerned about them than about developments in the United States.
Crazy how far-right demagogues just crop up like natural disasters, they couldn't possibly be *reactions* to anything, could they? Lacking all agency, lacking all soul and thought and values, how could such unfeeling robots not see that *your* beliefs are the one true path to goodness? Sad that they have so much popular support! Really, quite a tragedy that not everyone is so enlightened as you.
Concerning 1880-1930: the western world was certainly in a default Christian mode, where the majority believed, nearly all who did not said that they did, and very few were openly unbelieving. But the rot had set in, and I take your point. After religion has lost its mainstream influence it takes time for a society to lose the cultural effects, and this is a pleasant time to live if you are an atheist: society is orderly and polite and you don't have to mumble meaningless words on a Sunday. We could look at stretching that period out to 1970 and still be able to make a case that one lived under the benefits of a (largely) post-Christian society. But all good things come to an end, and after the drive of Christianity has shut down, the ballistic trajectory will gradually decay.
I'm an atheist who grew up in a 50's-60's rural English village. If I still lived there (I suppose 'there' means time as well as place) I'd be content to attend the Anglican church, and use my time there as I did as a child, examining the architecture, and wondering why there was a memorial stained glass window to St Hubert of Liège, the patron saint of hunters. I would hope that Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer is still used there, as it is a work of poetry as much as anything. Unless they have changed greatly vicars were not at all upset to have attendees who were not worshippers, and if they are, well, they deserve their dwindling congregations. I'd do it for my own sake, but I doubt that many would, and certainly not enough to revivify cultural Christianity. As it is, I am completely free from temptation to visit any of the baptist or United Church of Canada institutions that surround me, as they all lack the unwritten constitution of the C of E of the era: we'll all go through the motions and avoid at all costs any actual mention of what we believe, or don't.
In reading through the comments here, one idea that pops up a lot is cultural Christianity was replaced by wokeness, or degraded into wokeness. Maybe with a step in-between, but that this was the chain.
At an intuitive level, this basically seems correct to me, at least in the west.
Well, going through all common Christian moral beliefs and all common woke moral beliefs, and comparing them against each other, would be long. It's doubtful much agreement could be found there, at least among those who are neither Christian nor woke.
But there is one core difference between Christianity and wokeness that I think gets at the heart of which one is better for society. Christianity strongly promotes forgiveness, and wokeness clearly does not. Christianity wants to redeem, wokeness wants to cancel. In secular terms, this means Christianity is more pro-rehabilitation and wokeness is more pro-punishment. I think the Christian approach to "people behaving badly" is far superior to the woke approach to "people behaving badly".
At the moment, it *feels* that (cultural) Christianity and wokeness are the two most prominent moral systems in the west. That these may be the only two viable options for the foreseeable future.
If so, it might be prudent to make a clear choice between them. In making that choice, you can specify areas where you disagree with your choice, but still make clear why you prefer your choice overall. So you don't need to sacrifice any integrity or pretend to belief something that you don't.
The primary view of humanity in Christianity is that humans were created in god’s image. That’s what makes us special; different from the animals. And under god’s rule. Believing that is key to Christianity. But I’ve always found the reverse more believable. That Christianity is a reflection of our humanity and culture. A combination of what we’ve known over generations makes us work well together + the collective culture values of specific points in time + what those in power wanted at the time. This is why religions are always evolving and changing their rules and laws. Going from orthodox to conservative to modern. If I want more people to join my club, and my club’s message does not have any sort of awareness problem, I then need to make my club more attractive to them. From this argument it’s easier to see that instead of a society needing cultural Christianity to thrive, the Christians are more hangers-on, grasping at the values of a previous generation and railing about how things were better in the past before inevitably adopting the current values and then railing about how much better those were in the next generation. Until we’ve now come to a place where modern Christianity is less a reflection of what used to make us great and more a collection of gripes about what people didn’t like about the last cultural movement. You’ll always find people who feel unmoored by the current society and that’s modern Christianity’s best way to try to grow the club right now.
That Christianity's propositions at any given time are downstream of a broader Culture is true for certain values of Christianity (e.g., any church flying the up-to-date iteration of the pride flag), but you're going to need something more concrete to show that the Church was playing catch-up you whatever was trendy with the masses.
This underestimates the resilience of Christianity. Christian cultural hegemony did sort of collapse after the 1890s, yet by the 1950s, in the US at any rate, it was back. Before that, Christian cultural hegemony collapsed in the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, but then revived dramatically in the Victorian era.
But of course, that's only possible because some *really believe.* Like me. It takes believing Christians to keep the churches strong. Mere cultural Christians are just along for the ride, and may weaken it. To that extent, I'd agree with your rejection of the cultural Christianity argument.
The real value of the cultural Christianity argument is the support it gives to apologetics.
Let proposition A be that Christianity is true. Let proposition B be that Christianity has a unique propensity to foster free, creative, productive, livable cultures.
What is P(B|A)? Probably high. The content of Christianity strongly suggests that a loving God who wants to save mankind would seed a church with a propensity, among other things, to create free, creative, productive, livable cultures.
What is P(B|~A)? Probably low. Most human myths have not fostered free, creative, productive, livable cultures, so we shouldn't expect Christianity to do so either.
So suppose you start with some subjective probability of the truth of Christianity P(A), and then you notice that B is true? Do the Bayesian updating math, and you'll see why the cultural Christianity argument is a reason to take more seriously the possibility that God really did create a good world which went wrong through sin, but then became a man to save people from their sins, working towards an ultimate redemption of that fallen world.
It's the most difficult and uncomfortable kind of truth imaginable: the truth of deceit itself. It's a philosophical ouroborous that can neither be solved in conventional terms, nor dismissed and rendered obviate: that in order for truth to mean anything, there must be lies and falsehoods, which must be in some sense "true" in order to mean anything, else they wouldn't work or having lasting power.
Reading this article made me think of two examples of this principle in practice: a) for drinking in moderation, and b) for a healthy video gaming culture. Both of these things seem to have some benefit from a system which officially disapproves or does not tolerate the practice with heavy limits and regulation, but where there are plenty of unacknowledged routes for the practices to occur so long as people aren't obnoxious about it. It's only when we publicly admit the truth that neither of these things are inherently bad, and remove formal bans on them, that you get binge drinking chaos in the streets and grown men obsessed with Pokemon, and an industry awash with freemium, pachinko and bloat.
Yet in both of the above cases, exactly as with Christianity and Judaism, the seeds of self-defeat are sown within. Drinking always becomes publicly tolerated, and and video games have become totally mainstream. Both have in some sense helped, yet in other senses hurt their respective practice. The help is an increase in modesty and a sort-of baseline realism - we all like a drink and it sometimes helps, and video games are fun and anyone can enjoy them - but also danger with a sort-of falsehood attached to it - maybe it's wrong to say drinking is okay when some people can't handle it, and maybe it's wrong to make video games a macro industry when a lot of "mature gaming" is extremely sad.
The third example, I feel (and maybe fear) is our entire system of professional credentials. Our schooling system is abominable in so many respects, yet we all tolerated it for many many years without complaint because it seemed to result in genuinely good results: the overall best people for each job got their rightful place, and it was simple and fair for those who came runner-up to take their progress and shift to a worthy alternative spot. This is the "truth" of the system, even if the specific standards were somewhat false.
Nowadays we have rampant credentialism in lockstep with a feeling of gross incompetency across all occupations, and a genuinely feeling like our schools are infantilising prisons, universities poison and jobs run by nitwits and DEI monsters. It seems to be *ENTIRELY false* right now! Their is a growing feeling across all sects of society for the entire structure to change, and I believe this will come to pass. But will this solve the deep problem at play? Will we end up with a system that is true? Or will the baby be thrown out with the bath water?
I reckon the key truth lies (.... odd turn of phrase, isn't it) in studying this and identifying the parts that apply to the other examples present, including the arch example of our overall liberal, enlightened, secular culture itself. If I eyeball all of these facets of life from a certain angle, squinting carefully, what I see is a system of filters - filters for behavioural quality and excellence, that constantly need updating and eventually replacing whole-sale. There are specific filters and broad filters, and filters within filters. The system of filter update and replacement itself has a massive meta-filter, and when that works, we can accept the endless cycling of the lower filters as educational - they are features of the system, not bugs - but when the biggest filter breaks down, chaos ensues. And it all boils down to some relationship between truth and falsehood - the truths that guide versus the truths which distract, and the falsehoods that are harmless and serve as good-enough heuristics versus the truly deceptive or manipulative lies.
To put all this in perspective requires us to take this knowledge and apply it to some of the basics of our thought - which is to acknowledge the finitude of our minds. We cannot completely model the entire world, and thus must create a simplified understanding based on what we've encountered and the principles inferred. This model will conform to reality in some senses, perspectives and contexts, and defect in others. Some models are better than others, and some patterns of meta-models tend to make better models than others. But all models turn false and need replacing eventually - and replace them we must, because ultimately models are good for us, absolutely necessary, beneficial, and in many respects rather fun once grasped. But the exact point at which a model should be replaced, a filter should be updated, remains tricky.
Perhaps the final answer, if such a thing can be delineated at all, is this: more frequent updates = less time spent under rotten, decaying systems that help no-one. But people are often uncomfortable and annoyed when their system is constantly changing, and crave the ease of familiarity. Half of our souls wants constant change, evolution and growth and the other half wants security to the point of nostalgia. So maybe the real secret is to have a system which somehow satisfies both, by simultaneously constantly changing AND staying the same, a Schrodinger's cat of belief. Is it possible?
Anthropology used to think of a progression from magic, via religion to science. The catholic church played a pivotal transitional role as both promoting magic (miracles, saints, demons, excorcisms, etc) and rationalization. (This would confirm that catholicism cannot be a stable worldview over longer time periods.) On the other hand, a modern view of magic is not that we overcame it but that it still has an important role to play. Maybe understanding this issue better could shed some light on your question?
The argument here from the Catholic side is that miracles are not magic and the underlying philosophies are different, but since folk religion often uses prayers and so forth as much the same as charms and spells, yeah I see why anthropologists classify it as all the same kind of thing.
"The argument here from the Catholic side is that miracles are not magic" ... that could be taken as confirmation that catholicism is transitionary ... both promoting magic and rationalizing it ...
That would be great ... more generally, I am interested in the role of magic in todays world ... funnily enough I just read that Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks that "they can control the weather"
This reminds me of the LOTR books, where Sam asks Galadriel if her Mirror is magic, and she replies "I don't know what your people mean by that word, they seem to use the same word for the tricks of the Enemy."
I think it makes sense to use one word for miracles and magic, because both are supernatural interventions in the chain of causality. There's a drought --> I [pray to God for rain/do a magic rain ritual] --> supernatural forces cause rain. In a way, miracles are magic that God does.
Of course, the key difference between miracles and magic is control. Magic is something you seek to control, by wearing a magic ring or wielding a staff or commanding a genie or whatever. With miracles, you don't control them; at most, you humbly ask God to do something; a lot of the time, back in Biblical times, God just does a miracle without any input from you, and more likely than not, it scares the living daylights out of you.
“There is something which unites magic and applied science (technology) while separating them from the "wisdom" of earlier ages. For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem of human life was how to conform the soul to objective reality, and the solution was wisdom, self-discipline, and virtue. For the modern, the cardinal problem is how to conform reality to the wishes of man, and the solution is a technique.”
Very nice. So is the difference between magic and science that one gives an illusion of control and the other gives actual control? This sounds plausible, but could be critiqued from two directions. One is that, despite all the science we have, the socio-ecological system on our planet is completely out of control (Ukraine, Middle East, climate change, biodervisity loss, etc). The other is that magic may have played roles that are rather independent from controlling anything (as eg described by Evans-Pritchard).
I think Lewis and Tolkien would say that both magic and science give an illusion of control. Perhaps the time scales of that realization are different though.
I don't think people should hold their noses and go "Well this supernatural stuff is all rubbish but I'll cross my fingers and pretend, just for the secular benefits". That's no good to anyone. Be hot or cold, not lukewarm.
What I do think, though, is that Western society is based on the values of Christianity. That's what I want recognised and acknowledged. And right now we're living on the capital. Yes, we're post-Christian (sort of), but the underlying attitudes still are what is at the base of the foundation, like foundation sacrifices (https://www.jstor.org/stable/25510484).
Liberal/Enlightenment values will not just magically and organically pop up once a society reaches a certain level, and I think we see that by looking at the non-Christian cultures of the world we inhabit. Most of the globe has adopted Western systems, e.g. voting in elections and the like, along with secularisation and capitalism. But they didn't arise independently in those societies, and we have to question "why was Europe different?"
People have tried answering that (guns, germs and steel, I believe is one) but the whole core *values* are what forms a society, and they're very different.
And yes, I think our own Western society is changing as the old reservoir is used up. Modernity may not turn out to be so nice as we like to imagine it is, under the Whig view of inevitable and eternal progress and uplift. I'm not going to fight the culture war on here, but over the time I've been wandering around on the Internet, especially in fandom circles, I've seen a gradual but definite shift in values.
And I'm not talking about sex and drugs and rock'n'roll, where it's "yeah, you fuddy-duddy old conservatives are against fun", I'm talking about what I would consider ethics and the treatment of fellow human beings. Even the definition of "who is my neighbour?" is coming under question. "Why is X a bad thing, it's pragmatic and effective" is another. We're coming around, even the nice socially liberal "as many genders as the colours of the rainbow" types, to "yeah, if torture works, use it, what's so wrong with torture?" Those people are the Bad Guys and in fact they're not even really people, so why not? We're the Good Guys, it's okay if we do it.
We're using up what was left of the underlying, assumed values that came along with Christianity, and what is coming to replace them - well, I don't much like the shape of it, even if it assures me I can be what I self-define to be (just so long as I hold the Correct And Approved Opinions, otherwise I don't count as a person or a fellow-human).
Boy howdy do I have Lots of Thoughts on your post.
First, the good part! I agree with you that Christianity is responsible for our modern, Western, small-l liberal values, and we ought to be grateful. But not in the way you probably mean. Modern morality was caused not by "Christianity is a shining exemplar of great moral values," bur rather, by the early medieval church's prohibition on polygamy and cousin marriage. Joseph Henrich lays out the case in his book "The WEIRDest people in the world" - it's a brilliant book, I highly recommend it. Here's the (very abbreviated and simplified) causal chain:
-in most agrarian societies, people commonly marry their cousins or other relatives. This keeps the wealth in the family and also keeps the family as a sort of "superorganism." The extended family/clan/tribe is everything; the individual qua individual has very few rights. You put your head down and do as your elders tell you and know your place.
-but in the early Middle Ages, the Church banned polygamy and cousin marriage in Western Europe.
-Now people have to go outside their extended family to find a spouse!
-Slowly, gradually, this lets people start to think of themselves as individuals, separate from their family/tribe.
-Over many centuries, this leads some people to come up with radical ideas like "All men are equal" and such. And presto, modern Western morality! (There are lots more details I am omitting for the sake of time.)
If you're about to protest, "but drosophilist, you don't need this long convoluted process, St. Paul wrote 'there is neither Gentile nor Jew, we are all one in Christ Jesus' almost 2000 years ago," Henrich and I say, yes, these are inspiring *words*, but for them to make a difference to how society actually works, you need the social transformation described above. Buddhism has wonderful teachings about universal lovingkindness and compassion, but modern morality did not arise in predominantly Buddhist countries.
OK, this comment is getting long, I'll write a second comment.
As I said to another person, I haven't time right now but I will come back to talk with you on this.
Briefly, I very much agree with Scott: don't pretend you're a Christian (or Jewish or Muslim or Buddhist or what you like) because you're hoping to squeeze some secular benefit out of it. Be honest about not believing and just wanting to keep the nice bits.
Cultural Christianity can be taken two ways: the 'cafeteria Catholic' view where one picks and chooses which bits appeal and which bits to reject, like selecting from a menu. That's what annoys a lot of people who are more orthodox. There's the way Scott is using it, I think, or at least how the discussion is developing: that the culture of the West is, or was, Christian and the nice Enlightenment values, which then turned around and bit the hand that fed them, arose out of that and not out of simply "society got richer, more educated, and more liberal" so it could happen anywhere at any time just from "more money makes us all nicer".
OK but... you're not actually contradicting what I said? Joseph Henrich's thesis is not "we got Western secular morality by becoming richer and more educated," his thesis is "we got Western morality out of the historical contingency of the Church prohibiting cousin marriage, which, over centuries, led people to think of themselves as individuals." So yes, the Church was necessary, Christianity was necessary to get us to this point, but now that we're here, secular morality will do just fine.
Not cousin marriage *alone*, though. There was an entire package of beliefs which translated into practice. Royal families did their best to keep going with cousin marriage (on the basis that they couldn't find suitable mates otherwise) so that alone was not the big turning point.
*Why* did the Church ban cousin marriage? *Why* did it come up with the notion of degrees of consanguinity and what was technically incest? Certainly it took on laws and customs from civil society around it:
"In early Roman times marriage of cousins was not allowed, though it was not infrequent after the Second Punic War. Marriage between uncle and niece was unlawful among Romans. Consanguinity in the direct line, to any extent, was recognized by the Church as an impediment to marriage. Worthy of notice is the declaration by Nicholas I (858-67) in his letter to the Bulgarians, that "between those persons who are related as parents and children marriage cannot be contracted, as between father and daughter, grandfather and granddaughter, or mother and son, grandmother and grandson, and so on indefinitely". Billuart, however, calls attention to the fact that Innocent III, without distinction of lines, allows indiscriminately infidels converted to Christianity to retain their wives who are blood-relations in the second degree. Other theologians take it for granted that this declaration of Innocent III has no reference to the direct line. In the early ages the Church accepted the collateral degrees put forward by the State as an impediment to marriage. St. Ambrose (Ep. lx in P.L., XVI, 1185) and St. Augustine (City of God XV.16) approved the law of Theodosius which forbade (c. 384) the marriage of cousins. This law was retained in the Western Church, though it was revoked (400), at least in the East, by Arcadius, for which reason, doubtless, the text of the law has been lost. The Code of Justinian permitted the marriage of first cousins (consobrini), but the Greek Church in 692 (Second Trullan Synod, can. liv) condemned such marriages, and, according to Balsamon, even those of second cousins (sobrini)."
We've seen the push back against restrictions on marriage, which would formerly have been seen as incestuous, with that famous case of the "marriage with deceased wife's sister" in British law. Why do men want to marry their sisters-in-law? As the discipline around marriage relaxed (in the name of compassion and progress), such restrictions also came to be seen as onerous and then ridiculous:
"Prohibited degree of kinship for marriage included relatives by blood (consanguinity) to prevent incest, and extended to relatives by marriage (affinity) apparently reflecting an analogous taboo, or the idea that a married couple were "one flesh".
...The 1907 refusal of Holy Communion by the vicar of Eaton, Norfolk, to a parishioner legally married to his deceased wife's sister was overruled in 1908 by the statement of the Arches Court (a ruling upheld in 1912 by the House of Lords) that section 1 of the 1907 Act meant the Sacrament Act 1547 no longer applied to such spouses.
...The 1907 Act did exactly what it said and no more. It was amended by the Deceased Brother's Widow's Marriage Act 1921 to allow a widow to marry her deceased husband's brother. This was a response to First World War deaths to encourage remarriages, reducing war widows' pensions and increasing the birth rate."
And now we're slowly creeping back to "sure, marry your niece/nephew/cousin/step-sibling/anyone you like" as the strictures of religion, or the influence of such past strictures, are melting away. Don't be so quick to boast of the secular success, when the secularisation is washing away the foundations for such taboos in the first place.
Prohibition of cousin marriage did not lead to people thinking of themselves as individuals, that's a foolish notion. What has become of our vaunted individualism? "I can do what I want and I should be able to do what I want, so if I want to marry my cousin or step-sister then I should be let do so!" and give that a few centuries to get us back to the problem Henrich claims has been solved (see the alleged popularity of incest porn).
i'd say that people thinking of themselves as individuals is the *problem*, not the solution, and is responsible for most of what I dislike about western societies.
Given that we're currently engaged in reintroducing polygamy under the guise of "polyamory", and a lot of the culturally influential parts of society see individualism as a sign of white supremacy, I'm not sure this is a good rebuttal of Deiseach's point.
OK, here's my second comment, In Which I Question Deiseach's Claim That Christianity = Good Morality.
"Even the definition of "who is my neighbour?" is coming under question."
Why yes, it is. Imagine, if you would, a devout Catholic who runs for public office and who deliberately spreads vicious lies about his own constituents, saying that they eat pet cats and dogs, because he thinks it will help him win. These people are not HIS neighbors! They're immigrants from a different and inferior culture, they disturb the Real Americans(TM) of a salt-of-the-earth American town, f**k them! He doesn't owe them anything. So what if their kids' school had to be shut down one day because of bomb threats? I'm sure Jesus would approve.
"yeah, if torture works, use it, what's so wrong with torture?"
Certainly there's nothing wrong with it, not according to the pious, devout European Christians of centuries past, who used to torture suspected heretics, apostates, and witches with great gusto. Nobody expects the... ah forget it.
"what is coming to replace [Christian values] - well, I don't much like the shape of it"
Let me tell you what I don't like: self-proclaimed God-fearing, devout Evangelical Christians in America falling in with a greedy, petty, vain, vengeful, dishonest, all-around sleazy crook and cheat and considering him the Lord's anointed servant who can do no wrong in their eyes. Just the other day a preacher called Kamala Harris "Jezebel" for the sin of... opposing Trump and running for President while female, I guess.
Now let me hasten to add: you can certainly make a long list of horrible things atheists have done and said. No group of people have a monopoly on virtue or vice. As Solzhenitsyn wisely said, "The line between good and evil runs through every human heart."
As to the "shift in values" you observed on the Internet - the Internet/social media is a really crappy place to look for values; it seems to bring out the worst in people. No wonder you think society is going to pot if that's where you look! There's a lot more good in people than you would guess by looking at Reddit or whatever. Of course, I'm posting this on the Internet, how's that for irony? Anyway, have to go now.
Yes, absolutely, with the addition of "you don't *need* to be a Christian to understand that torture, falsely accusing others, fomenting hate, etc. are bad things."
You don't need to be a Christian. You do need to live in a society that inherits a culture marinated in:
"38 “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ 39 But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. 40 And if anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. 41 And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. 42 Give to the one who begs from you, and do not refuse the one who would borrow from you.
43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. 46 For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? 47 And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? 48 You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect."
Because these things are *not* self-evident, as we have seen all over the world before an Enlightened Person comes along to teach them.
OK, I lied, one more reply for the road and then I'll go!
These words by Jesus are beautiful and inspiring and also have jack-all to do with how the vast majority of Christians have *actually* behaved throughout the vast majority of Christendom's history. Yes, there have been martyrs who lived and died by "turn the other cheek" and "love thy enemy" as well as more recent heroes like MLK Jr. who took this as their inspiration.
But on the level of the whole civilization? Who actually turns the other cheek and loves their enemy? The crusader who massacres heathens with a cry of "Deus vult!"? The military commander who, when asked how to tell heretics from innocents, says "Kill them all, God will know his own"? Queen “Bloody” Mary, who had Protestants burned at the stake? The Trump supporters who adore their Orange God King precisely because he hates the same people they hate?
Obligatory Gandhi quote: "I like your Christ. I don't like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ."
Again, that's all just "but you guys don't live up to the words". Why do you expect us to live up to the words, if the words come from a place of falsehood? There are no gods, so Jesus wasn't god, so if He was talking about "God says do this" He was wrong.
You can't take, as liberal Christians do, the 'nice' parts like the Golden Rule then go "right, we've invented this thing called the Enlightenment all out of our own heads and we've dumped religion and religion has nothing to do with how our minds were shaped".
The influence of Christianity is the water we fish all swim in. Now the water is drying up. Where are you going to get new springs of water? And don't say "well everyone knows that the niceness principle comes right out of evolution" because the hell it does, and other societies have demonstrated that.
> This period wasn't very religious - Nietzsche had already declared God dead in 1882.
It’s worth remembering that Nietzsche’s proclamation wasn’t meant to say “everyone’s, like, totally over that whole God thing”. Rather, he was saying exactly the same thing as the cultural Christians: people had lost their explicit faith in God, but they hadn’t carried through the full impact of that loss - their beliefs and their lives were now a building without a foundation, doomed to fall. (This fall would be the “revaluation of all values”, one of Nietzsche’s highest projects.)
From the parable of the madman, showing that he is received by and talking to atheists, and that he chides them for not fully carrying through the implications of a loss of God:
> Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: “I seek God! I seek God!”—As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated?—Thus they yelled and laughed.
> The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I.“
…
> Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. “I have come too early," he said then; “my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves.”
Few of us have decision-making power when it comes to our country’s overall “culture” and where that is heading. But we do have decision-making power when it comes to how to raise our children.
More specifically: Should those of us who presently are non-believers none the less raise our children in the faith we have left? Or, more nuanced: How much should we expose our children to our own former belief? None? A little? A lot? All in?
I would be interested in the views of other commentators here. (The question will soon be relevant also for Scott and his wife, I notice.)
My “realized preference”, as I look back, was not to send my kids to Sunday school or otherwise engage them in organized Christianity. I raised them as non-believers, and my wife agreed (or went along) with this.
But on vacations when they were children, we always visited churches. Or other temples when we could enter (Buddhist, Islam, Judaism). Showing deference (such as remove cap before entering, not to speak loud, respect the atmosphere, spend some time there). Installing in the children that this is no ordinary place for those who enter. This is a place which is beyond merely advanced “entertainment” (the unavoidable curse of secular modernity – everything turns deep-down into entertainment, including high art).
And I observe that my children, when they now do their own travel, keep this habit of visiting and spending time in places of worship. And listen to church music, alongside other types of music.
Which I am glad they do, as so do I.
...Edit to clarify the link to Scott’s post: Assuming that a “cultural Christian” is someone who mimics belief in order to “save civilization” or some other tactical, collective purpose, you can hardly be a “cultural Christian” (or any other religious belief) in front of your kids. And your kids are the only ones your religious beliefs are likely to have an impact on. Unless you want your kids to perceive you as a hypocrite when they grow up, and/or you do not want to be fully honest to them about your real beliefs for the rest of your life, and/or you want to instill in them a cynical, tactical attitude toward religion.
By visiting houses of worship on vacation, you successfully transmitted the value "it's good to go to houses of worship on vacation." Okay, fine, they get to see some cool art and learn how other people live, but this seems to be inconsequential. I don't think anyone argues that we will rescue civilization from it's enemies by gawking at art in a Buddhist temple once a year.
If you send your kids to Sunday School, you'll pass on the value "it's good to send your kids to Sunday School." I'm not sure what possible use that could have. If Christianity has a benefit to civilization (it does) it's going to require individual commitment to practice that's greater than what you decided not to give your children.
Yeah, well, it may seem “inconsequential” to you. Maybe it is. But notice that the purpose of giving your children something is not to “rescue civilization”. Anyone who thinks one’s individual actions can save something like that, and acts based on such a motive, would suffer from delusions of grandeur.
The purpose of giving your children something is to give your children something. Nothing more, nothing less.
So here’s the thing. Like many who have left a religion, I ascribe whatever depth I have in my mortal soul to the years it took to break free. Meaning I would not be without it, for complex psychological reasons. And I want my children to have depth in their souls.
..but I can hardly raise them in the religion of my father, assuming that it will set them on a similar journey. Imagine the situation when they reach puberty: “Dad, why did you imprint religion in us as children, when we have later found out that you yourself do not believe?” “Because I wanted you to have the experience of breaking free”. “But we will never be able to break totally free! Remember the Jesuits and what they said about having a child till it is seven!” “Yes, and that is what I wanted to achieve.”
…what I wanted to do instead, was to give them the light version. Providing depth in their souls without a wound that runs too deep. Hence churches, to get across that here we are dealing with something genuinely important, that you must make up your mind about. That journey will limit the risk that you end up as shallow people.
If you have children yourself, and a similar background, you may understand.
So, I was raised like this. Without any religion, or really any specific teachings one way or the other about it. In fact it never even occurred to me to ask my parents what they thought of the topic, that's how much of a non-issue it was. I still couldn't tell you, though I assume they are non-believers.
I don't think you should be worried about this "depth of your soul" thing that you're worried about. Life has plenty of things in it to give someone character and depth - wrangling their way out of fairytales doesn't need to be one of them. I do not find myself to be more or less deep or compassionate or serious or thoughtful or any of that because I didn't have to fight my way through that specific nonsense, as opposed to many other forms of nonsense, and no one who knows me gives me that indication either.
I also don't think that visiting churches is at all relevant. I for example love going to Church with people on the rare occasions I'm invited. I love Christmas and bringing out my manger and creche decorations. To me it's all just enjoyable on a purely aesthetic level no different than Halloween and I have no deeper angst or emotional association with it at all - Santa and Jesus are the same, to the extent I have no feelings towards either of them beyond as a fun holiday theme, though Santa obviously is much more appealing because he's jolly and has a flying sleigh and a cool outfit, while Jesus is just a hippy beggar.
Here's what you should perhaps be worried about. Which somewhat goes to the topic of Scott's post. You likely DO have a lot of underlying assumptions/norms/feelings that you retain from your religious upbringing, which you don't identify as being associated with your prior religion because they aren't directly coded that way, but which did sort of flow from it in a way you might not realize. And if you aren't passing THOSE messages on in the same way, your kids probably won't absorb them or feel the same feelings. My mother did once remark to me that it never occurred to her that by raising her kids without religion that we wouldn't absorb certain assumptions she had. Because she just assumed they were more natural, inherent human feelings, than they apparently are.
I can't necessarily identify all of them, but feelings about something like sex seem like an obvious one. My parents were not religious nor practiced or believed in any religious restrictions or customs, yet they retained a basic sense that sex is best in a loving relationship. I think most previously religious people feel that way. I never absorbed that message or a lot of others that have to do with a sort of...feeling that certain things are "sacred" even if you don't actually believe in the concept of sacred anymore.
So I guess I would say that you should think about what things you consider to be sacred, or want your kids to treat as if they are, and then figure out if you're doing enough to actually convey that to them without them actually believing that anything could be sacred. Because even if you tossed the supernatural beliefs, I'm guessing you do still have some emotional wiring that does treat certain things as sacred.
It feels like your main objections to modern society are sort of... buildings are ugly and people are mean and stupid on social media?
To me, those are both symptoms of modern hyper-capitalism. That is what defines the systems and structures that decide what gets built and what the algorithms reward.
I'm sure others will disagree with me as to how much capitalism is to blame there, but it always seems insane to me that it's not even an object of consideration when people talk about the ills of the modern world.
It defines so much of how society and culture and our daily lives are shaped these days, how can it possibly not be even a *consideration* when diagnosing broad-scale problems with the entire society?
I agree capitalism destroys beauty but in fairness I should point out that marxists like Adorno were highly influential in promoting ugliness in the arts.
It's also how people act, in person, in day to day life. And the justifications they give for what they do, and how those justifications are received by the people around them.
As a convert from atheism to Catholicism, I also think the "cultural Christian" argument falls short.
I agree (and agreed as an atheist) you can't build a firm foundation on pretending to believe something you think is false. And it doesn't work from the Christian side either—the claim of the Church is not that adopting parts of the faith is a lifehack like bulletproof coffee: it's a relationship with a real Person, and can't be instrumentalized.
The logical thing to do if you think that Christianity is a flawed progenitor of a culture you like is to get curious about why and try to engineer a better one.
And if you can't, there's room to be a little curious to see why Christianity might be, in GK Chesterton's words "a truth-telling thing" but you only become a Christian if that curiosity leads you to believe it works *because* it is true, not because it approximates the truth with some fanciful embroidery.
"It can't be instrumentalized" is too strong of a claim. If nothing else, following Catholic sexual teaching is pretty much a foolproof way avoid dying of syphilis.
We don't make specific claims about Catholicism having material benefits (it's a *cross* we're called to take up, after all) but it pretty obviously does.
I think this misses the subtext of the Cultural Christianity position. The REAL thrust of the position is the feeling that the masses are doomed to be stupid, unable to have intelligent, individual evaluations of value, cannot be educated, and (if you're a "Tech-Rightist") that they ought to be allowed to indulge their petty prejudices and entitlement to have their values reflected back at them from everything that they see.
I think the obvious rejoinder is, 'But you were the reason it all went to shit. You were. You can't complain it all inevitably goes to shit when you are sitting there with a wrench gumming up the entire machine. If we get rid of your apostasy, we get rid of the rot at the center of the apple, and then we can have All The Nice Things back.'
Whether we have reason to believe that's true is another story.
>And like everyone else in this category, I'm anti-woke. I do hope the worst is over, but I have continued nightmares about what would have happened if the DEI world had done a better job exploiting the post-George Floyd moment and cemented its advantage forever.
This is such a weird statement to me. Are we really still acting like there was some woke totalitarianism that we narrowly averted rather than having gone through an "anti-woke" moral panic in reaction to excessive virtue signalling? The woke menace was always just some HR officials getting over their skis and then getting smacked down by the actual powers that be.
It is possible the threat was exaggerated, but I still don't see it as less than the counter reaction, so calling it an obvious moral panic seems begging the question.
I want to pass along a great statement I once used in a talk to a group of religious psychologists. It's attributed to several British statesmen, most commonly Churchill, but no matter who said it, it's good. "I consider myself a supporter of the church, but I support it from the outside, a flying buttress."
It's pretty surprising and disappointing to me that the guy who wrote the Parable of Lightning can write off "This requires society enshrining a false belief as official dogma" as a boring aesthetic quibble that nobody needs to worry much about.
I don't see him as writing it off: it seems clear to me that even if his second objection was somehow solved, he still wouldn't believe things he knows are false. I think he was sarcastically referring how to other people such things don't seem to matter much.
Keeping your house in good condition takes constant work against the forces of entropy, and there's no guarantee against disaster. You could still get hit by an earthquake or wildfire and lose it. But, if you want to keep your house a little bit on fire because you enjoy the warmth and pretty light, you are basically guaranteed to lose it because you're already well into an ongoing disaster.
Christianity CAN devolve into postmodernism, but modernism is basically guaranteed to do so.
As far as truth goes, the concept that culture embodies deeply valuable lessons about how best to build up a beautiful society doesn't require people to present it as True. Presenting it as true may be more durable. It's fully compatible with evolution, I think even more so than naive social Darwinism
This was a core argument or choice of Peterson, who called giving an opinion on whether God is real or not a trap. He says he now does believe in God but as far as I know doesn't also endorse Christianity as a comprehensive Truth
I think this can be compared to a dam. A majestic structure prevented or lessened floods for millenia. People always had fantastical beliefs about it. When people stopped having fantastical beliefs, they also tore down the actual thing. Big floods returned
I would also feel uncomfortable endorsing atheism as a literal and sure truth if I thought it was culturally valuable. A core parameter of science is that it can't observe anything extraneous to this universe. It's not possible to know there is no divine element to reality. And reality seems so unlikely that apparently the only two possible beliefs are some kind of design or infinite multiverses where the parameters that allow a stable universe where life can exist are statistically likely to exist
What this leads to for me is a sort of Pascal's cat. Life may be imbued with divine meaning or not. And then, not only do we not know, if you allow the thought that it could be, it seems to cast a warm shadow on the "not" possibility. If I accept that life may have a divine element, I also feel that, if it doesn't, why should that mean that it can't have its own self imbuement of life and meaning?
The common thread among all the religions that 'soften', is that it occurs once they move out of the desert which had 'hardened them' with 'hardship'.
Hardship leads to orthodox religions. Once you remove the hardship, they 'soften' their stance and become 'modern'.
In history this was covered some by Peter Turchin.
In Fiction, this was main point in the sequels to 'Dune'. The Fremen were bad-ass when they lived in the desert, but when they conquered the universe and converted Dune to have water, they 'modernized' and became soft, and the earlier generations looked down on the later generations as loosing their edge.
There is no solution, because if society does gain technology, and life becomes easier, then the religion will also change, soften, become 'modern'.
Until later, as Peter Turchin describes, this leads to collapse, war, and hardship --> And thus the cycle begins again, with new 'hardship'.
The observation is really interesting; I don't think we really understand why society recently lost its religion. I think a major factor is that before 1800 something like 30% of children died before 5, worldwide, throughout history.
Mammals are designed for childcare, and humans have especially intense/prolonged parental duties, requiring profound neurobehavioral adaptations. In that context, the loss of a child is understandably horrific even without using our empathy. Religion offers a crucial emotional buttress in that context.
"the challenge of modernity" covers over the mechanism of action -- it was the pressure to open capitalist markets and create market societies which ultimately undermined every one of the human communities mentioned in this piece, whether Christian or not. The culture of modernity is the feverish dreams hallucinated by the human animal under conditions of capitalism.
Histories of capitalism frequently cite the English East India Company as the earliest joint-stock company — where shareholders could transfer their shares without affecting the operation of the company — to the late 16th Century under the reign Elizabeth I. But examples of joint-stock companies predate this example a bit in central Europe.
Not to mention the fact that the things that most liberals value, political and economic freedoms, freedom of speech, freedom of association, etc. were all pried out of the hands of repressive, theocratic institutions. The Enlightenment occurred in large part despite the state of Christianity at the time. There was a strong reaction against the wars of religion that were likely the most devastating man-made event to occur in Europe at the time. Those areas that went on to found secular governments had been predominately Christian for nearly a millennium before they became secular. The fact that the Enlightenment occurred in these areas is more of a proof that secularism will out rather than Christianity is vital for allowing it to happen.
>The fact that the Enlightenment occurred in these areas is more of a proof that secularism will out rather than Christianity is vital for allowing it to happen.
Then why didn't it happen in any non-Christian society? Why wasn't "secularism will out" true of any other kind of culture?
The argument here seems to be "all cultures move towards modernism, so it's not worth it to try to change culture in positive ways." That doesn't seem right!
I feel like this problem is already solved and we're actually just trying to figure out implementation/optics. Nearly every smart person I observe who has absorbed the threat of woke (it being a family member of the genus 'murderous ressentiment') espouses the same general principles that can only unfold in one way, practically. Assuming AI doesn't institute Gay Space Communism which is honestly the more likely solution rn, we'll get *slightly gay space classicism*, which is just moderate racism/sexism for disillusioned libertarians (whether left or right coded). If society just titrates towards 50% more egoism and materialist suspicion of Big Ideas (which is the rightful end-state of postmodernism), you get defacto classicism: mixed economy republic where people expect not to be meddled with, to be directly bribed off with large infrastructure/state programs that actually work, and to have access to slightly exploitative relationships like prostitution, less unionized labor, and a police force that effectively targets undesirables. Power and social stratification comes out from behind the curtain when people get burnt out on ideology and demand results. The gods (various competing states/classes) are indifferent, fallible, pluralistic/stratified, and beautiful, and that's taken for granted in a disillusioned person. This stands in opposition to the dream of (state) monotheism, which is totalitarian, infallible, and uncompromisingly unified in its notion of 'the good' and its indivisible 'humanity'.
> If modern atheists want a society better than our current one (or rather, better than wherever modern culture is leading us) they'll have to invent some new cultural package that's never been seen before.
I think the response is supposed to be that Christianity gave rise to modernism, but the bundle of "Christianity plus the belief that Christian culture is important and we shouldn't give it up because if we did we would get modernism" might not give rise to modernism.
> I hate asserting false things, even if they're "practical". I don't ask anyone else to share that particular quirk.
I don't understand the treatment of telling the truth as an arbitrary preference with no moral value. Doesn't it make the world easier for everyone to navigate if people tell the truth? Yashua Mounk has decried the Democrats tendency to tell polite lies over uncomfortable truths. It seems to me that wokeness is this tendency transformed into a cultural norm and then spiraling out of control - people believe some of the polite lies and then concoct more in order to protect the ones they believe. Personally, I encourage everyone to tell the truth, maybe not always but as often as possible
I think arguments about whether or not cultural Christianity is good are basically moot, because it's fundamentally not viable. You can't turn back the clock on the generational religious decay process past a certain point, because:
-You can have an 'X club' that's mostly people who believe in X.
-You can have an 'X club' that's half people who believe in X and half people who like the vibes of X and are willing to pretend.
-You can even, for a little while, have an 'X club' that has few remaining who believe in X and mostly vibes-based pretenders who passively fool each other, but...
- You *can't* have an 'X club' once everybody realises everyone else was pretending. However much you may want the vibes, the impression (accurate or not) that a strong core of people actually believes in X is load-bearing, and without it people inevitably drift away to other things.
True, and I admit I'm writing from the UK which is pretty robustly in stage 4 by now. However, I don't think the long-term prospects in the US are great either, because 3 is likely to decay to 4 over time. It's difficult to imagine the US becoming as irreligious as Europe (and it may well not) because public displays of religious zeal remain so common, but it seems to me (as someone who's exposed to a lot of US culture involuntarily) that most religion in the US is to some degree politicised, and politicised religion is a great cover to hide the erosion of real belief (see Ireland, which was anomalously religious for western Europe in 1990, in a way that was obviously tied up with politics, but by 2020 had decayed remarkably quickly towards the baseline).
Whether that happens or not remains to be seen, but your involuntary exposure--whether that's Hollywood, journalism, or advertising--is quite unlikely to be an accurate reflection.
I think you’re missing a critical point here. The birth rate difference between conservatives and liberals in the U.S. is huge, about double for conservatives. In the UK, there’s almost no difference. Demographics will slow down or even reverse the decline of religion in America. Also, immigration to the U.S. from Latin America is religiously Christian, while immigration to the UK is secular or Muslim, neither of which will improve the state of Christianity.
I was once a member of a Unitarian Universalist 'church'. (Or more accurately I was a member of the choir... whatever.) UU maintains the vibes of Christianity - Sunday morning services in a church looking building, with music, recited prayers, a sermon, and socializing after. However, I attended service one Easter Sunday and the preacher said there was no life after death. On Easter. Or as some people call it, "Resurrection Sunday." So not a Christian group. There's some talk about Jesus but similar amounts of other religious leaders. I'll buy that it might be difficult to have an X club that maintains the vibes of X without most people believing in X, but it is possible to create a Y club that has all your favorite parts of X but instead of teaching kids that they should wait till marriage for sex and are dirty and compromised if they don't you give them honest and accurate information about sexuality. Maybe we should do more of this.
My impression is that stuff like UU exists chiefly as an off-ramp for people raised in more traditional religion without much of a long term future, but I could be wrong, especially given how hungry for IRL community people are these days.
Maybe you can't go back just one step along the ratchet. But if all the people who think that "everyone else was pretending" leave the club, and the only remaining (regular) attendees and (younger) clergy are the small minority of people who actually believe, then it seems you might go back to a (significantly smaller) church consisting of those people who actually believe in X. This requires the crisis to occur sometime before the church in question is completely hollowed out of belief, but that doesn't seem unrealistic in e.g. the context of the UK. (I'm currently attending a Church of England congregation where it seems pretty clear that all the clergy truly believe, though perhaps not every person in the congregation.)
Of course, what's left won't be cultural Christianity, it will be some form of actual Christianity, so this isn't an argument against your "moot" claim, but it semes that that the social phenomenon you mention is compatible with a cyclic behavior, and not just inevitable decay once you reach step 3.
Christians (C) are claiming that Christianity leads to the atheistism (A) you like, and that eventually this atheistism degenerates into wokeness (W). So they say, if you want A (and not W) support us in making C. Your "counter" argument is that eventually C decays to W. This argument doesn't counter anything?!
If you buy their premise, then you should make as much C and A as possible. This conclusion follows as you are primarily interested in A, but C is preferable over W, and so you should mildly support C when it doesn't conflict with A.
This type of argument could only conflict with A. It won't conflict with W at all, because arguments of the form C will lead to A, will lead to W, and W is bad obviously won't resonate with people who think W is good. Therefore it can only resonate with either A or C, and is only relevant to these two types of people.
Furthermore, if one believes in A, and doesn't believe in W, then one obviously doesn't believe that A necessarily leads to W. Therefore, one could never believe in "if you want A(not W) support us in making C".
Finally, I think concerns over W are vastly overblown on Substack
> The challenge of modernity has felled both Christian theocracies and the virtuous liberalisms of the past alike.
What virtuous liberalisms are we talking about? Scott mentioned that he has a nostalgia for fin de siècle culture. This was when, in certain parts of America, a black man could be hung for the rumor that he looked at a white woman the wrong way. This was when women did not have the franchise, and suffragettes were beaten, imprisoned, and force-fed when they went on hunger strikes. This is when the Catholic Church exploited the labor of unwed mothers in the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland and in similar institutions in Canada, Australia, and the US, and when children were abused and murdered in the Church's "charitable" institutions. This is when wealthy capitalist oligarchs forced factory workers to work 12-hour days six days a week for a pittance. Fine, maybe the architecture was a bit prettier, but academic art had reached its nadir. Empires were rotting from within. It was a house of cards waiting to collapse. Of course, after the old order collapsed, the atheists started grand genocides in pursuit of their political and ethnic utopias. Liberal democracy didn't really have a chance until the latter 20th Century.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali seems even more confused...
> Western civilisation is under threat from three different but related forces: the resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilise a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.
Western civilization has always been under threat since Prince Ballomar crossed the Danube and drove the Romans back to the Alps devastating Pannonia Superior, Inferior, Noricum, and Raetia (most of modern Austria, Hungary, and Bavaria). But I'd say the threats now are milder than they were when the Ottomans arrived at the gates of Vienna. Of course, she displays the reactionary fear of Woke ideology. Give it a break, Ali!
The whole Islamic threat to the west is so slight that we allow Muslim immigration.
> This is when the Catholic Church exploited the labor of unwed mothers in the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland and in similar institutions in Canada, Australia, and the US, and when children were abused and murdered in the Church's "charitable" institutions.
It would be interesting to actually do some numbers on that relative to other atrocities at the time. Sure it gets a lot of movies, documentaries and the Hollywood treatment, in a way that Epstein’s island does, or other religions do not. It’s all very strange.
> Empires were rotting from within. It was a house of cards waiting to collapse.
It’s hard to get counterfactual history right but the European empires were at their height, and the American empire in the ascendant. It was the European wars that put paid to that. Future societies will probably see this while era as an Anglo era anyway, Britain passing the Baton to the US.
My bad. I should have specified as to what contributes to rot from within. I was thinking of the moral decay of fin de siècle culture. I'm talking about the escapism, the extreme aestheticism of the times, the world-weariness, and their fashionable despair. It sapped their vital fluids, and isn't this the reason that civilizations decline? <I ask snarkishly>
But I'm not sure they were sitting pretty. They had a restless Working Class (wooed by the Communists and the Fascists) who ended up revolting in Russia (commie), Germany (commie), and later Italy (fascy) and Germany again (fascy). It took WWI to get the dominoes to fall, but they did. Queue the rise of the US as a superpower.
Also please note I'm doing my best to keep the Romans in the forefront of people's minds. Romans mentioned 44 times vs Greeks 30 times. Egypt 4 times. Go Rome!
Actually, I just finished S.M. Stirling's new novel _To Turn the Tide_. It's re-envisioning of DeCamp's _Lest Darkness Fall_. Time travelers stranded in Rome of 165 AD. It's a fun read.
I'd argue that it's about ideals. Societies where the worst injustices are places where the society falls short of its own ideals, and in which, when confronted with this, the society eventually changes and becomes more just and views this as being in accordance with its own ideals. As opposed to societies where the injustices are direct results of the ideals, or societies where the injustice is more important and the ideals quietly change to accommodate the injustice.
This critique does assume an independent standard of justice by which societies and their ideals can be judged, but then, in a way, that's an artifact of cultural Christianity.
This is a fun argument, but in my Scott's position might be easier to understand if his usage of "modernism" were fleshed out more precisely. As used here, it clearly stands in for an undesirable cultural end state, but it isn't clear what aspects of the broad term "modernism" are so objectionable.
Here is a generic definition from Wikipedia, which I found mostly unhelpful as a metaphor for "bad culture"":
"Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction, and subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, architecture, and social issues were all aspects of this movement. Modernism centered around beliefs in a "growing alienation" from prevailing "morality, optimism, and convention"[1] and a desire to change how "human beings in a society interact and live together".[2] "
"The modernist movement emerged during the late 19th century in response to significant changes in Western culture, including secularization and the growing influence of science. It is characterized by a self-conscious rejection of tradition and the search for newer means of cultural expression. Modernism was influenced by widespread technological innovation, industrialization, and urbanization, as well as the cultural and geopolitical shifts that occurred after World War I.[3] Artistic movements and techniques associated with modernism include abstract art, literary stream-of-consciousness, cinematic montage, musical atonality and twelve-tonality, modernist architecture, and urban planning.[4]"
I'm fairly boggled by your historical impression of the 1880s/90s.
"wasn't very religious", say what now? There were no societies of any size on this planet in 1890 that even _tolerated_ atheism socially or legally, let alone in which being secular was the norm across a sizeable swath of the population. (Nietzsche was, to say the least, not even vaguely typical of most people's beliefs or assumptions during his lifetime.)
"economic liberty", I mean....if you lived in certain countries, and/or hadn't been born into the "wrong" race or religion or class for wherever you were, sure. Otherwise not so much! Only tiny slices of the millions living in Asia or the Russian Empire or Africa or South America enjoyed any meaningful economic liberty as of 1900. Nor of course did black-skinned people in North or South America, Jews anywhere east of Germany, etc.
"progressophilia", again, yes in certain places. But very much not in other places and those covered _much_ larger swaths of the world. Unless maybe we're taking a reeeeally relativistic view of what counted as "progressivism". (E.g. sure the Kaiser's Germany was in some ways relatively progressive and is described that way in histories of the period -- but "relatively" is doing a whole lot of heavy lifting in that assessment!) Large sections even of Europe and the United States were not as of 1900 adopting anything resembling progressive values.
Also, regarding that "20th century cultural package of wokeness and postmodernism (and fascism, socialism, New Dealism, etc)" -- if that's how you view it then perhaps worth pondering which period of history spawned the instigators and builders of all of those movements/ideologies. Stalin and all the members of his politburos, Hitler and all his associates, FDR and all his cabinet members, Mussolini and Franco and their followers, Mao and all his associates, Japan's 1930s leaders, a whole generation of South/Central American tyrants like Trujillo and the Somozas and Pinochet, etc. They grew up during the 1880s through 1900s, every one of those named and plenty more. Does it still seem desirable to want back a period which spawned _that_?
If you apply the criteria you are applying here to the modern world - then the modern world comes out nearly as bad. The post is really about the narrow West - in many ways the Anglosphere. Which is fine in an American blog.
No. The modern world isn’t the west. The Weird people of the west are a minority. There is little or no economic liberty or freedom of thought in the world right now in the very areas you talk about there.
Ah. So not joking, but also nonresponsive to what it is replying to and hence nonserious.
It's easy to forget sometimes that ACX is actually part of the broader online realm and so discourse here will sometimes descend into internetting. Well at least the mute function still exists so, bye.
According to Wikipedia the "Golden Age of Freethought" spanned the years from 1875 to 1914, so I don't think the society of the 1880's and 1890s was quite as hostile to unbelief as you make it sound.
To be sure there is a difference between being a crusader for a minority position and actually dominating the culture, but I think it is far to say that somebody like Robert G. Ingersoll was "tolerated" given that he was able to give numerous public speeches in favor of his agnostic views.
The argument made for cultural Christianity in this post are
1. That it's false, and asserting false things is bad, even if it leads to good outcomes
2. Christianity eventually fell apart as a cultural package, and would again
I think these can easily be combined into one argument. If you believe that Christianity is now much weaker in the West than it was in the past, surely at least part of the reason is that novel theories in science contradict some stories described in the Bible, e.g, Darwinian evolution contradicting the story of Genesis.
It's argued that first, institutions like "science, health, and learning" find their origins in a Christian world, as do "apparently secular freedoms - of the market, of conscience, and of the press". If it's too be accepted that all of these had origins in a Christian world, and I think this claim is probably debatable, then it still doesn't imply that one in the present day west should accept Christianity as the one true faith. Writers like G.K Chesterton and Tolstoy at least had the merit to reject the modern world in its entirety, to say that modern Western thought was built on medieval European thought, and modern Western thought is good, therefore we should reject it and return to medieval European thought feels ridiculous to me. It makes sense to say that modern Western thought is bad, therefore we should return to medieval European thought, but then I fail to see how you can package this into an argument against a traditionalist religion like Islam. It's possible that I'm misreading here, or that Ali's argument is a weak version of the right argument. To fully understand, I'll have to read Tom Holland's Dominion probably, which I don't think I have the time to do anytime soon.
Finally, there is the argument from meaning, which I don't think is relevant to this post, so I won't debate here.
What is the definition, the sine qua non, the heart, of a good civilization? That is what we are discussing , right?
"A good civilization is one where old men plant trees that they will never sit under."
I don't know the etymology of this quote, but it sums it up for me. If I can keep that principle in my mind and heart then I feel like I am on my way to being a good citizen. What rules I might have to follow while I'm at it is a more complicated question...obviously most people need to generally follow the rules in the culture they happen to find themselves in, or it won't do very well. If I can see obeying a rule, not as an infringement of my personal agency, but as a gift I am giving back to my civilization it makes it easier to obey it.
The Judeo-Christian structure is a good one; "Cultural Christianity" is a lousy name for its reinvention.
My solution:
The One Atom theory of the universe should be heavily promoted, and I am not joking. It is the quantum version of "We are one with God". I am not a physicist but I understand that this theory is not implausible. Wouldn't the deep knowing (because it is scientific) that we are all particles in one atom be powerfully uniting, in spite of all the nonsense we will engage in anyway?
It doesn’t really matter if it’s true or not because quantum physics generally is providing scientific proof for God. It’s not doing much good for the stories that we make up about God though. But isn’t that part of growing up?
I feel good about it. Like it has a good chance of still being there in 100 years, even if no one knows it was me.
I hope the tree feels good, too. It was rescued from the middle of a hedge, 1" from a curb, under some power lines, so it will hopefully have a much better life in its new home.
That's an interesting theory! It kind of reminds me of this, which I don't recall where I got from, so it might even have been from you:
It’s a beautiful thing to rescue an orphan tree. It inspires me. I need to plant some trees now that I’m getting to the point where I’m probably going to be lying under it if anything. 😆
Christian culture without Christian doctrine would be what?
My first thought: Opening public meetings with a nondenominational prayer, baptisms and wedding and funerals and major holidays celebrated in churches even by people who didn't believe, Christian imagery in a lot of buildings and places, Christian names and institutions in important roles, etc. It seems like this is true in a lot of Europe. When I go to Belgium, there are tons of Catholic institutions, but when I go to Mass, I'm often in a church full of old people. (I recall completely surprising one of the nominally Catholic people I was visiting because I actually cared about not eating meat on Friday during Lent.) Many European countries have state churches supported by tax dollars, laws substantially influenced by religious teachings, even political parties associated with particular religions.
These places mostly don't seem to have gone woke, but I'm not sure I agree that they've avoided destructive post-Christian ideologies. And Christianity seems to have fared worse in Europe than it has in the US.
If this doesn't capture it, I guess I'm not quite clear what it means to embrace Christian culture without Christian belief.
I think there's an important difference between "proclaiming beliefs you think false" and "accepting some premises that aren't provable/disprovable because it seems to lead to a better life or society." I am not sure that the second one is the right thing to do, but it might be sensible, whereas the first one seems bad in general and also very hard to sustain.
If I think democracy is a terrible system of government that mostly leads to bad outcomes, but proclaim the greatness of democracy because the most successful societies so far have been democratic ones, I'm still going to be willing to discard democracy anytime I think it's in the way of a more important goal.
If I've accepted the premise (assuming it's not really workable to prove/disprove it) that democracy is the best system of government we humans know how to build, and proclaim that, I and everyone else in the same boat won't be generally willing to discard democracy as soon as there's something we want more, whether that's legalized gay marriage or a thousand-year reich.
No, no, obviously we need to return to a few centuries of deifying the Roman emperors, that will set us up nicely for a millennium of Christianity, after which we will hopefully have a few moments of nice things, until wokeness starts ruining everything by putting women in Star Wars again.
Richard Dawkins has been calling himself a cultural Christian for decades and obviously doesn't think you should just disbelieve in private, so seems to me the premise of the article is wrong. What is Dawkins advocating for when he says he's a cultural Christian? I think that's much closer to what people mean when they advocate for cultural Christianity. Sure he's just one person but...he's Dawkins so...
I'm surprised that Scott wrote this whole thing without mentioning cultural Judaism as a point of comparison. There's plenty of Jews out there who go round identifying as "Jewish" and doing culturally Jewish things without actually believing in any of the religious stuff or obeying any of the inconvenient rules.
Cultural Christianity is about seeing that sort of thing and wanting to do it too.
Was it not second-temple Judaism which gave rise to Christianity which gave rise to modernism? And was it not the first Jewish diaspora which gave rise to second-temple Judaism? And was it not first-temple Judaism which gave rise to the first Jewish diaspora? And was it not Canaanite culture which gave rise to first-temple Judaism? And was it not the Ghassulian culture which gave rise to Canaanite culture? And was it not Besorian culture which gave rise to Ghassulian culture? And was it not Qatafian Culture which gave rise to Besorian culture? And wasn't it the Circum-Arabian Nomadic Pastoral Complex which gave rise to the Besorian culture? And wasn't that caused by a fusion between hunter gatherer and farming cultures? And is it not the case that the farmers there can trace their ancestry back to hunter-gatherers? And is it not the case that hunter-gatherers can trace their ancestry back to proto-humans? And would you disagree those proto-humans have ancestors which resemble apes more than man? *That* is the culture we should be emulating.
All of that is to say... we must RETVRN TO MONKE!!!!!
I want to believe that God is real and faith beneficial, but when I hear Sam Harris talk about this issues I can't rationally escape his arguments. So far, I didn't hear a good argument from a believer that tops Harris's atheist argument.
Valueless Postmodernism does not have the power to sustain a civilization over the long term. The postmodern society will possess the zombie corpse of The West until it finally collapses under the weight of its own absurdity and internal contradictions. Civilizations rise and fall, generally replaced by even better ones on a higher metaphysical plane. There is nothing to fear. As Herbert Butterfield said, historians do not spend much time mourning the fall of Rome. Stand up for the values that made The West great, and the future will be bright.
Instead of worrying we need to embrace falsehoods for the mysterious goods they produce, why not just solve the mystery of the good-fruit-from-bad-seed and then we can munchkin it and have 1,000x the goods at a fraction of the cost, and without all the epicycles, like we always do?
Postmodernism has sterilized the root from which it sprung. We might have lived on, sterile for some time, but *the world is coming*, our new neighbors are not sterile, and so, the next age, whether we choose to participate in it or not, is no more one of preservation by protection. That's over.
The new metamodern age is preservation by reproduction. We need beauty and truth to overflow their banks and become living springs, to push up in waves against other living springs that will drown us if we simply build a wall and pretend that will work as it did in the ole protection paradigm. "And He is the One Who merges the two bodies of water: one fresh and palatable and the other salty and bitter, placing between them a barrier they cannot cross." - Quran 25:53"
We have to be memetically what Abraham was genetically. If we can be convinced to kill our ideas because if we get asked "Why?" 10 times in a row, our recursive reasoning software crashes into existential despair...
If we can be convinced to kill our ideas because there's no ultimate justification for anything and besides, our ancestors were worse than their ancestors...
If we can be convinced to kill our ideas because The Best Lack All Conviction While the Worst Are Full of Passionate Intensity...
And it's not that we're just unwilling to fight and kill, (not without certainty, surely). It only comes to that in the first place because, long before, we were unwilling to live and face death. And it made our ideas and our arguments gentle and without force; forcefulness is a faux pas.
We are so greedy and ravaging against nature with our culture, we dare not be so also with our ideas. We came to violence so many times over ideas that got a little too powerful, a little too psychoactive. I mean, we're burning this guy at the stake because he agrees The Spirit emanates from The Father but doesn't agree it also emanates The Son. When did we gain the power to make shoggoths of gnats? (and why are we capitalizing everything?)
So we learned to believe, but not act like we believed, and Co-ExIsT-bumper-sticker together. And it worked wonderfully! We can prove it with numbers! We have slain the dragon of nature and gorged ourselves on verdant treasures like never before.
All the ideas lost their edge, though. Nobody kills for them, anymore, or wants to. Nobody dies for them, anymore, or dares to. "God" went from LSD to CBD.
Elsewhere, God is not dead, and the people he enlivens are not dead, and the ideas around his periphery occasionally crackle with excess power and explode; God's cup runneth over, and he has made the seas to teem with life, each after its kind.
Postmodernism stills, collapses all to flat, colorless "Truth". Metamodernism overflows with color and creation. It doesn't just pull itself together and decide to take desperate action, despite the lack of any true _reason_ to care, because the stakes are just that high. When the stakes are nothing, metamodernism still leans happily into action, no justification needed!
If you're free in the extreme case, you're free in the everyday. If you throw up your hands and say, "I don't know the ultimate answer, but I need to buy some food, for no reason", then you can throw up your hands and say, "I don't know the ultimate answer, but I'm not worried, for no reason."
The good news is, we can make multiculturalism work like never before. This time.
This time, we all share a lingua franca: online culture.
And we have too many neighbors to make enemies of all of them, so maybe we do none of them? Maybe we just copy how we act online. We can't go starting arguments with every person we disagree with; they're everywhere! Eventually, we stop starting them at all; that's what the other online veterans do. I mean, that actually goes double, what with AI and how it will soon terraform the internet. Obviously we don't want to be the fools arguing with the impiest of AIs all day; that's not the dominant internet culture.
In metamodernism, we stop looking for contradictions between our ideas, so we can use them as a crux to prove one wrong. That may have felt like proving our side right in the old days. In the new days, disproving any random religion or worldview wrong doesn't go *nearly* as far to proving your own; maybe it just proves some 3rd 4th or 5th idea is the right one!
In metamodernism, instead, we compete with color and creation. We show our ideas in their best form, we embody them as evidence of their efficacy! We shine and see who shines brightest! What are your contradictions to THAT!, when the contradiction=sterilization paradigm literally leads to extinction anyway, AND says it can't justify itself anyway, AND has a horrible time of it along the way, AND sees only the starkest reminders of horror in the finest displays of beauty.
So no. No thank you. No thank you, *sir*.
And who is truly the walking contradiction, the living being that uses reason to talk itself out of life, or the living being who uses reason to make enough beauty to fill the emptiness of postmodernism?
And if choosing life and love and beauty and truth and goodness is a contradiction, what if choosing death is also a contradiction? One strict catch, crossed with another, canceling both contradictions out.
So choose for yourself, if reason is confounded either way.
And if you look on life reasonless, does it mean life or death to you?
I don’t fully grasp what you’re gesturing at here - too much overwrought prose at the expense of clarity - but what I can grasp, I appreciate. This is why the ACX comments are a unique delight.
Hello, David You are welcome Thanks for reading through. Just a brief reply to your points:
1.) Agreed. Jesus' teachings contain no such injunctions. But Christianity is also the sum of what it has done throughout history, the good and the bad. Ideals often get perverted. Look no further than Buddhism where a simple minimalist religion was turned into elaborate and ornate ritual.
2.) I fully agree here too. Voluntary charity is different from coercive redistribution, a difference Marxists don't care about. Additionally, in a certain light, Marxism promises a similar christian paradise but here on Earth, which was Marx's grouse with religion in the first place that he famously called the opium of the masses. He wanted the workers through communist revolution, without his input of course, to deliver the paradise of classlessness, et cetera here on Earth rather than turn the other cheek now and wait for some undefined reward in an unlikely heaven. This is the sentiment Che is echoing when he says those words.
3.) Yes, Christianity has often featured witch-hunts. It's a regrettable element. Shafarevich is also a lot more interesting and far simpler to read than Leslek Kolakowski, the other great historian cum critic of Marxism. I often find that scholars from Eastern Europe and Asia are more aware of the horror of Marxism, having lived through it and more likely to offer a penetrating analysis than western scholars whose own perceptions of the subject have been tainted by postmodernism, deconstruction, and other rather meaningless concepts.
Hello, David. You are welcome. Thanks for reading through. A brief reply to your statements:
1.) Agreed. Christ's words contain no such injunctions( Indeed, it often demonstrated a compassion for the sinful: eating with Zaccheus, the conversation with the woman by the well, the famous case of the adulterous woman). The rigidity of christian doctrine most likely begins with Paul who for all his contributions took things in a very different direction. But every religion is also the sum of the things they have done, both the good and the ill. Marxists plead innocence by trying to draw a line between their supposedly noble intentions and the misery the ideology has created. Courage demands christians don't do the same.
2.) Fully agreed. There's a massive difference between voluntary charity and coercive redistribution by a totalitarian state. Intriguingly, in a certain light, Marxism promises a similar paradise but here on Earth. This might explain Marx's grouse with religion which he famously called the opium of the masses. Marx wanted workers through communist revolution, without his sacrifice of course, to deliver the fantasy paradise of classlessness, etc rather than turn the other cheek now and wait for an unspecified reward in an unlikely heaven. When Che says those words, he's simply echoing the same sentiment.
3.) Yes, it's a regrettable side to Christianity. On another note, Shafarevich is deeply interesting and a lot more readable than Leslek Kolakowski, the other great historian cum critic of Marxism. I find scholars from Eastern Europe and Asia offer sharper analyses of socialism given that they not only lived through its horrors but unlike western intellectuals, their analysis isn't usually tainted with postmodernism, deconstruction, and other rather impotent concepts.
FWIW, I've been brainstorming a list of Christian Art from 1870-1930. Feel free to add to it.
Elgar - Dream of Gerontius, 1900
Widor - Mass, 1878
Faure - Requiem
Verdi, Requiem
Vaughan Williams - 5 Mystical Songs
& Fantasia on Christmas Carols
Parry - Jerusalem; I Was Glad; My Soul There is a Country
Whittier/Horder - Dear Lord and Father of Mankind
Bruckner, Tota Pulchra Es
Architecture:
Westminster Cathedral (built 1895-1905, not to be confused with Westminster Abbey)
Sagrada Familia, Barcelona, begun 1882
I was expecting this to be easy but actually it felt like slim pickings. Musically, a lot of important work was done in this period to preserve and edit older work so that it could be performed again e.g the monks of Solesmes published the first Liber Usualis in 1896 - basically a compendium of plainchant for the Catholic liturgy. And a lot of work was done collecting and transcribing folk songs including ye olde Christmas Carols. Carols from King's, that stalwart of Christmas Eve programming in the UK, began in 1880. Point being this era was responsible for more than original content.
If we combine Joe Henrich's "WEIRD" cultural evolution and adaptation, and Tom Holland's Dominion, we get some notion of the extent to which we swim in Christian waters, both in terms of unintended consequences and history of ideas and practices. Where would we be without the notions individual rights and of a secular sphere separate from the religious one?
Any society that can "honor its ancestors" - a quaint idea some cultures have - achieves some level of stability. A modern version of this would be to uphold those values and practices that demonstrably have resulted in social improvements and know where they came from. And to understand that the very institutions of self adjustment and critique that gave space for the woke notion that all good things have to come from deconstruction or elsewhere, are the ones we still need, but have lost trust in - in places.
I get that some who wish to find personal guidance in their lives look to the most proximal faith-tradition that provided it, and that it, for them, provides a foundation for the principles underlying Western societies. But those principles have already been secularized. While some live in tension - individual liberty vs. 'the meek shall inherit the world'-thinking, for example, maybe the service Cultural Christianity does to non-Christians, is to remind us that there are some good things in Western societies that can be honored without faith.
The key element for atheist ideology is surely the removal of a mythical all powerful omniscient patriarch who is used by rulers to justify their positions of power.
Absence of this paradigm and the hierarchical society that it engenders should be the foundation of an egalitarian society by default. What cultural specifics that comprises will vary according to each local culture and its specific needs
> Only 10% of Israeli Jews are ultra-Orthodox, and it would be lower if they didn't breed so fast.
Isn’t that percentage steadily growing? By outbreeding everyone else and having higher retention rates, those communities seem bound to succeed in bringing back the kind of society they want.
Here to disagree with "Only 10% of Israeli Jews are ultra-Orthodox, and it would be lower if they didn't breed so fast."
tl;dr - The idea that Jews as a whole move towards being more secular is primarily a diaspora phenomenon, seemingly not replicated in Israel, and secularization is at least much more than offset by differential birth rates, even outside the Hareidi (Ultra-Orthodox) world.
Clearly, the original proportion of ultra-Orthodox Jews was lower, not higher; in 1948, there were about 40,000, and by 1980, it was 4% of the population, ballooning to 14% today. That's definitely due to the birth rate, but it's also a testament to how few drop out - the decline in growth is due to the (slowly) declining birth rate. And more generally, the religious world in Israel hasn't been shrinking, unlike Christian groups which have declining religious affiliation; the less-than perfect fidelity to religious groups - https://www.taubcenter.org.il/en/research/are-israeli-jews-becoming-more-secular/ - is still very high, with 10-20% of Religious Zionist kids moving to secular schools, and a single digit percent of Hareidi kids moving out. (Also, people don't appreciate that "Religious-Zionist" is what would be considered solidly orthodox in the US, so it's probably more religious than most American modern orthodoxy.)
And my impression, for which I can't find data, is that Masorti populations are also growing, not shrinking, compared to decades ago. So across groups, the changes seem to be towards more religiosity, or at least the dropout is more than offset by higher fertility.
There seem to be too many unexamined assumptions when talking about the influence of Christianity. For example, people take it for granted that Christianity "civilized" Rome (some consider it a blessing, others consider it a fatal weakness), but maybe it was the other way round. Maybe being a minority had a humanizing effect on both Judaism and Christianity. If your religion rules the country, it is easy to focus on killing the infidels and heretics, but once you become an oppressed minority, many people suddenly discover the virtue of tolerance and not killing each other.
As many people have already mentioned, "belief in belief" is not the same as the belief proper. You won't convert someone to Christianity by telling them "actually, the story of Jesus was made up, but we should all pretend to believe it for political purposes". Even if the person agrees that this is a good political strategy, it makes Christianity "less sacred" in the sense that if you are going to promote the religion for instrumental purposes only, why not *improve* it? If Jesus is made up anyway, why not make them a black lesbian? More importantly, why not elect a black lesbian as a Pope?
By the way, is the "belief in belief" limited to the lay people, or is it also okay for an atheist to become a priest, or even a Pope? If they do, is it required that they at least pretend to believe, or should they say openly: "I am doing these silly things only because it is a politically approved tradition, no educated person actually believes this, right?" How much of the religious dogma is required for cultural Christianity? Should we drop the belief in Trinity? What else? Should we reduce the entire Christianity to: "be a good citizen, do not convert to any religion that doesn't call itself Christianity, and pretend that there is an afterlife that delivers some kind of justice even if everyone knows there is none"? (And how much would such belief in belief protect against e.g. Islam which offers an actual afterlife full of non-metaphorical sex slaves.)
>The challenge of modernity has felled both Christian theocracies and the virtuous liberalisms of the past alike. If modern atheists want a society better than our current one (or rather, better than wherever modern culture is leading us) they'll have to invent some new cultural package that's never been seen before.
I agree that something new is needed but I don’t think it will come as a result of intellectually driven cultural engineering. The challenge of modernity is it’s a vacuum for inspiration. Dire and unmistakable necessity has never been in shorter supply. The same is true of new frontiers—they’re virtually none within reach. This scarcity of obvious motivation makes us listless, bland and cynical about trivial things.
What’s probably needed now is a Winston Niles Rumfoord to ram fresh purpose down our throats, sparking an explosion of urgent and pertinent innovation that corresponds with a broadly shared vision.
Western societies have been secularizing at a steady pace for many decades now. There's no reason not to expect that to continue. Tying your ideas to religion is giving yourself albatross that will get heavier every year as more and more people view your ideas as medieval superstition. This problem is much graver when you look at the slice of the population with money and influence. Judges, bureaucrats, CEOs, movie producers, big tech oligarchs, etc. The Right's strategy over the last 20 years has been to target their message to the bottom 75% and then wonder why they keep losing.
But suppose a religious revival does occur. It's not entirely outside the realm of possibility. Who would people be turning to for religious guidance? In America, it would probably be the actual leaders of mainline Protestantism, evangelical Protestantism, or the Catholic Church. They're unlikely to turn to Pope-critical trad Catholic dissidents, Christian identity or Kinism, the Greek Orthodox Church, or whatever the new fad on the Online Right is.
Requiring a "guarantee he'll be re-elected" is a pretty high bar for deciding whether somebody represents a worrying development.
I wouldn't say Musk is far right (though I can see that my comment might have given that impression). But he is an unhinged, immature, loose cannon with lots of money and influence and I think if we're talking cultural decline, he's a bigger part of that than "wokeness".
Yeah, I guess some of my examples are from places that culturally don't have much in common with the USA, but (a) some of them *do* have cultural similarities that are probably relevant for the discussion (e.g. Western Europe) and (b) some of them have a big impact on the US culture wars themselves (e.g. Netanyahu).
I am still trying to understand if anything has changed at all or if the only difference is that now we have twitter.
If you have strong centralised and media who usually (but not always) favours loyalty over truth; then people who rise to positions of power will most likely be people favoured by some sufficiently large fraction of the media, or who have resources to essentially create their own parallel media of campaign ads and so on; and the best way for an elite to keep its friends in power is to promote credentialism and the bedrock of that is universities with opaque admissions and revered names.
Here's the thing: many government functions have always been incompetent or corrupt; elections have always had a tonne of dodgy stuff going on in them; there have always been unconstitutional court decisions; and university students have always been made fun of for being, as a group, the dumbest most-immature most-ill-informed yet-most-opinionated people in society when evaluated outside precisely the exams they sit (and also for generally, again as an aggregate, picking the worst regimes in the world who want to kill them as the objects of their wet dreams).
It definitely appeals to me to imagine that we're standing on the precipice of civilisation and waiting to see if we're going to fall over the edge; but I keep reminding myself of historical parallels for everything that's happening -- it's just that we're getting information and fact-checking (without loyalty to one or another section of the elite) in real-time from twitter. It's like how our view of the world suddenly darkened from 24hr global news, and suddenly we understood that more or less every day there's some catastrophic disaster. Now we have crowdsourced news and fact checking and understand that all of our institutions are horribly run and it is panic inducing.
He believes that all you need is a solid set of deontological values which most Western adults had (until recently) "stealing bad", "killing bad", "rape bad", "raping children very bad" and so on and so on; and also "objective truth is good" and "individual freedom is good".
He argues convincingly that the thing that has gone wrong (and he does think everything is going wrong) is that these values have been replaced by a nebulous consequentialism, and a different set of deontological values (essentially what woke people believe) that are antithetical to both logic, truth (truth being subject to emotions and subjectivity) and the values above. He thinks being against logic and truth is an important aspect of what is happening -- because he thinks holding some sacred view that is blatantly untrue means people get very good at double-think and effectively stop feeling any dissonance or guilt about believing things that are wrong; an example is scientific american the other day (being subject to much ridicule by saying) that differences in athletic performance between men and women are entirely attributed to cultural issues like rules around coaching, and there are no biological effects.
Final comment: the thing I find funny about the cultural Christianity argument is how Culturally Christian the woke stuff is in many ways: 1). the idolisation of poverty, and victimhood; 2). the demonisation of money, power, and resources; 3). the antisemitism; 4). the faith and trust placed in a select few, whose utterances should bypass any rational evaluation (whether it be judges, or whitelisted academics, or Fauci); 5). the conviction that you shouldn't listen or be exposed to views that disagree with the orthodoxy lest it infect you; 6). the separation between sex and love (but the view of sex as a degenerate and passing passion that was regrettably necessary but should be avoided for the most important people such as priests; morphed into the view that it was an essentially meaningless hobby, like playing checkers, that you should feel free to do in whatever manner you like and with as many people without experiencing any emotional or psychological or venereal problems as a result); 7). the best, most dedicated people don't have children.
Again, many some of these are universals. Maybe some are me being flippant or unfair. But it shouldn't surprise anyone that aspects of Christian culture live on strongly even in avowed atheists.
Indeed, in the Jewish context, the trend you describe of Orthodox=>Conservative=>Reform=>secular is not simply a lessening of their Jewish education into nothingness but also generally represents a replacement and assimilation of Jewish education by the dominant Christian-informed culture. Jewish friends who haven't received a Jewish education speak to me about Judaism in exactly the same way Christian friends do. That's because they've received the same background Christian-informed by-osmosis impression. Again, nothing about this should be surprising. Certain ideas and values and ways of thinking are just "in the water". I recommend the book Anti-Judaism by David Nirenberg for an entire book on how ideas about Jewishness have been "in the water" in the West or East.
8). valuing faith above reason (this specific aspect of traditional Christianity I think has huge consequences in how a bunch of things are viewed in the modern world). 9). paternalism: this overlaps a lot with a bunch of the previous ones but I think it's interesting in itself: most churches are separated between the lay people and clergy and the clergy have a privileged position not just in procedure but in knowledge -- indeed in Catholicism, by design, until recently, the lay people should not bee reading the Bible themselves but always have the information mediated to them. I often think of this when visiting my NHS doctor and not being allowed to see my test results or information they have, or even be told exactly what they're doing tests for. I'm not saying one causes the other but that there's a common culture here of paternalism where you have a privileged group watching over the scum like me.
"At least this is how it’s worked for Jews: the first generation (after immigration) are Orthodox, the second generation Conservative, the third generation Reform, and the fourth generation completely lose interest. If someone wanted to perpetuate Conservative Judaism forever, their best bet would be to support and promote Orthodoxy"
The claim about the first generation being Orthodox is not accurate. See:
"A common accusation that a Haredi debater levels at his non-religious counterpart is that while both their grandfathers or great-grandfathers were observant Jews, the non-religious person has severed the chain of a generations-long Jewish tradition. When non-observant Jews who are not versed in Jewish history gaze at old family portraits, they usually see men in dark suits wearing hats, some sporting a short or a long beard, and women in modest dresses, some with their hair covered. On the strength of their ancestors’ old-fashioned appearance, and unaware that this was the dress code in former generations for Jews and non-Jews alike, these non-observant Jews conclude that their forefathers were observant, and that the Haredi debater has made a valid point. This, however, is not the case."
I also sense confusedly that the decay had something to do with "modes of production", which in turn had something to do with technology. Without going all Marx, almost two hundred years too late, it seems that the traditional Christian order was doomed by the steam engine and mass production, if it hadn't been doomed by the spirit of questioning of the preceding century. It just took a while.
We're not quite past that stage - "things" are still being mass-produced in factories, using lots of energy as input - but with wealth being increasingly concentrated at the top, UBI has become a mainstream idea. If we have a society that will keep many of us alive but not gainfully employed, surely the future "cultural package" will need to take this into account?
Doctor: "I'm sorry, but you have cancer. It is fatal if untreated but there are options, and I recommend improving your diet."
Half your commenters, the patient: "WHAT? I'm in the best shape of my life! Prime age. Certainly better than when I had that bout of rheumatism a decade ago... Anyways, going back to eating whatever I want and thinking that nothing matters because my health will continue to improve. That's just the natural order, you know. Line go up!"
The latter-day-saints essentially believe in sim theory. They believe we are in training here on earth to progress to be as loving as Christ.
They use modern day prophets to keep things relevant and have shared secret rituals, beautiful art, music and architecture along with a high birth rate.
They're very pro scientific advancement for obvious reasons as well.
Christianity is mostly stable and takes centuries to devolve into Liberal Atheism
Liberal Atheism is mostly unstable and takes decades to devolve into woke progressivism.
Trying to reverse either takes work, but if you try to maintain Christianity then each unit of labor goes ten times further: you are a salmon swimming upstream (which they do all the time). If you try to maintain Liberal Atheism you are a salmon swimming up a waterfall. Maybe possible, but if you stop there and don't keep going you're immediately going to fall back down.
This seems to be a generic problem of societies. Otto von Bismarck: “The first generation earns the money, the second manages the wealth, the third studies art history, and the fourth degenerates completely“.
This is where the philosophies of Integral and Spiral Dynamics, I think, get it right: these shifts are an inevitable part of the evolution of human culture and consciousness. We can, of course, try to include good pieces from all these stages (i.e. certain morals that are rooted in conservative religions) and carry them forward. But it's a category mistake to imagine that we could somehow go back to a prior time. As you noted, across all countries and religions, the same story plays out. We have to chart a new path forward and accept that we can't go back.
I'm a non-cultural Christian, and I've thought about this same issue.
On the one hand, yes, Christianity is unstable, and this is inherent, because it's full of choices, and built in from the Garden of Eden story is the assurance that sometimes people will make the wrong decisions. (Judaism, sharing this, has the same apparent vulnerability.) Almost every Christian denomination invites you to choose Christ (I don't know how Calvinists reconcile this; I've never thought of that question before). Even when all of your culture is Christian -- medieval Europe -- you can quiet-quit. And medieval Europe gave birth to, well, us.
If every human being on the planet were 100% devout Christian, or 100% devout Jewish, this would cease to be true with the very next generation. "Choose ye this day whom ye shall serve."
And so here we are.
On the other hand, consider the alternative. We could have a belief system that requires you not to leave: Islamism, Communism, facism. I hope none of us here wants *that*.
So, yes, it's always falling apart. And reviving. And falling apart again. And while it's doing it, we get the same awful things you can find in many civilizations (you can make a list) but also tremendous new inventions, like science, the abolition of slavery even for people in your out-group, human rights, and "render unto Caesar." Even if Christianity/Judaism are always falling apart and losing members and getting us here, here isn't so bad. Compare it to PDRK, Saudi, the old USSR, or everything that came before.
As for what we could do to make being pulled downstream less quick, I'm still thinking about that one.
[In class] I thought I was feeling something something's wrong, I could tell I wasn't communicating and I didn't know what why, and it suddenly hit me to my heart: they did not recognize the name Moses. ... Secular humanism is a big bust ... if you take religion away and the politics becomes a religion okay Dogma becomes becomes a religion and that's what's happened. All these enlightened parents want to to raise their children without any you know religious uh contact and the end result is inability to recognize the great myths, the great Stories, the great Legends of the West.
Then she goes on to tell a similar instance in which she's getting that the students don't recognize the name "Hitler."
The Christianity Big Lie is: God exists and cares about you.
The Modernity Big Lie is: All people are “equal”.
Scott rejects the Christianity Big Lie, in spite of what flows from it; but defends (or atleast goes along with) the Modernity Big Lie.
The problem with Scott’s analysis is the existence and importance of Luxury Beliefs and Luxury Attitudes. The reason these are an issue is that we are not all the same…
To take just one example, skepticism is a fine virtue — in people who care about the truth in a particular field, and have some skill in understanding that field. Generic skepticism in the entire population is not quite such a virtue. Same for, eg, cynicism. I could give many more such examples but space is limited.
So what do we do about this? History, from at least the time of the Gracchi shows us that there is both a demand in the lower classes for claims that destroy society, and a willingness of some in the upper classes to provide such claims and feed the resulting fires. Bottom line is you can’t just say “The root beliefs of Christianity are icky, therefore I will build my utopia without such beliefs” given actually existing humanity and the fact that plenty of them think differently from you.
In a perfect world, I think we want something like Brave New World, where alphas to epsilons all hold realistic views of their abilities and desires. In the absence of such, we need something get beta’s to accept that they should be explaining (but not designing) policy, and epsilons to accept that even if they don’t understand the details, policy is actually appropriate for them. And I don’t see Christianity as any worse than any other alternative for this.
Unless you actually believe the Modernist Big Lie, what’s your alternative? Where Christianity fell apart was not “in itself”, it was by allowing the transition to Modernism. As long as dangerous ideas were confined to discussion between smart elites, things were OK; the problem was allowing ideas to go wild into the population…
I don’t have great solutions for how to avoid this (and especially not how to get to there from here); certainly while we want an aristocracy, we can’t allow it to be based purely on birth (obviously that failed) or on credentials (obviously that is failing) so on what? ‘Accomplishment”, yes, but details???
This is all I have time to say on a huge subject, except to restate something I’ve said before: I believe that China understands this point, and that THIS drives their social media policies. The issue is not censorship, or the suppression of certain facts; it is ensuring that debate is held between sensible, intelligent, responsible people, to try to get at some sort of truth without surrendering to groupthink or mob mentality.
Maybe they will fail, but they seem at least more aware of the issue than the West, which seems to trying hard to prove Spengler and Nietzsche (albeit a century later) absolutely correct.
A Christian perspective: I think the pattern we see in history is divine intervention followed by its unfolding and then descent into decay. If Christendom was kicked off by the incarnation of God and his continued presence by the Holy Spirit, it is hard to see what the next intervention would look like. The visions and dreams non-Christians in various parts of the globe are having of Jesus doesn't quite seem to fit the bill. Perhaps it is Jesus' promised second coming, but if so there is a lot of prophesied nasty times that we will experience first.
I don't get this argument. Suppose somebody says, "If people stop exercising they get fat. People have stopped exercising, and they are now getting fat." If you respond, "Well, I don't think that works, because I don't like exercise, and if exercise was a panacea against fatness, nobody would end up fat," don't you get a funny look?
The argument goes, "If you stop being culturally Christian, you'll lose the good things from society." We're losing cultural Christianity, and we're losing the good things. And the post says, "Well, nah, if cultural Christianity holds off collapse, then there wouldn't be collapse." But that's skipping the step. The argument is that cultural Christianity leads to good things, not that it naturally compels allegiance so that people will always be culturally Christian.
cringe. dude 1890 was probably horrible if you're like gay, or psychotic, or haven't been rich. it wasn't a great time. now is. stop this nostalgia bs, it sounds like an autistic adult who doesn't get the young kinds and then using some fancy words and abstract theories to validate his missing understanding of a younger generation. it's fine, just trust it a little bit. your psychiatry stuff is really good man but i feel like every specialist with an audience starts to think of themselves as somekind of universal genius...
sorry i should have explained, i just read "wokeness and slave morality" like morality is either JUST about doing good things or just about not doing bad things. it's both obv, and boomers really dropped the ball on the second part of the equation for some time so a lot of pollution problems or colloquial hate speech have been kinda ok bc the focus was on progress, and now that it calibrates for a few years people are getting pissed because it may be uncomfortable to limit yourself here and there. is just egotistical to me. as if you wouldn't get credit for good things anymore??
1) I'd argue the world wars were the main reason the west lost confidence in itself and turned away from Christianity, and absent them it wouldn't have been replaced by the' 20th century cultural package of wokeness and postmodernism'
2) Cultural Christianity could be a bit like how Thomas Jefferson's view as expressed in his bible, that Jesus was a teacher and philosopher of note rather than the literal son of god. This would view him similar to how the Buddhists do the Buddha rather than how the Christian church does.
Much lower quality, much more emotion-driven, than your usual well-reasoned posts. The fact that you can be yelled at by people who disagree with you is not some decay of a liberalism that existed in the 1890s. White supremacists did a successful literal coup against the elected government of the largest city in North Carolina in 1898. People who publicly disagreed with white supremacist positions in the South were routinely assaulted or even murdered up through the 1960s. The NYT saying untrue things about you is a violation of any reasonable norms of civil debate, but it's not a violation of bedrock principles of classical liberalism, certainly not one on par with murdering political opponents and overthrowing a government.
Can't we have a pleasant and coherent techno-optimism religion for the masses? Because it's really the masses that struggle when unmoored from a framework of meaning and purpose that religion creates.
+1 on East Asia being a refutation. Taiwan and Japan are both doing pretty well without Christianity.
Japan was militarily occupied by a majority-Christian country which replaced its constitution (and forced it to tolerate Christianity).
Japan still has the Constitution imposed by that country.
Tolerating Christianity ≠ culturally Christian
The architect of post-war Japan, Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida(1946-1947, 1948-1954) was a Christian. Suprisingly, the current Prime Minister, Shigeru Ishiba(no relation to Yoshida) is also a Christian. Even more suprisingly, 9 out 65 Japanese Prime Ministers have been Christian.
Also, the current Emperor's mother is from a Christian background(had to convert to Shintoism when she married the Emperor). I think its fair to say that while few Japanese are Christians, they are disproportionately represented amongst the Japanese elite.
With regards to Taiwan, Chiang-Kai shek converted to Christianity later in life. Sun-Yat Sen was also a Christian. Though I think its fair to say that Christianity does not have as much influence among Taiwanese elite compared to the Japanese elite.
Looking at the other Asian Tigers, the current leaders of South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore are all Christians, and they have had many Christian leaders in the past as well.
While obviously nowhere as influential as the West, I think its fair to say Christians are disproportionately representated amongst the elites of Asian Tigers. But how much we can attribute the economic success of these countries to the religious beliefs of their leaders is up for debate.
Hong Kong's Christian leaders are exactly the people spearheading its descent into a fascist dystopia, so I think that proves the opposite point very, very well.
Communism, Fascism, Liberalism, all emerged from a Christian millieu in Western Europe within a few decades of each other. They are all denominations of godless Christianity ;)
> Also, the current Emperor's mother is from a Christian background(had to convert to Shintoism when she married the Emperor)
Did she have to convert? I wouldn't expect Shintoism to be exclusive of other beliefs.
Yes, according to Wikipedia. This was in the 50s. The Imperial Family was also a religious role and was considered to semi-divine. Sure, the Americans abolished that concept after the war, but I am sure the traditionalists didn't suddenly just change their minds because MacArthur told them so. The Shintos also violently persecuted the Buddhists for being a foreign religion in the early Meiji period. While Shintoism is definitely less exclusivists in one sense(multiple gods), it can also be quite nationalistic, so less exclusive in that regards.
There was a Meiji decree enforcing separation between Buddhism and Shinto. The reason for the decree was that no real distinction was observed before then. Syncretism is the East Asian Way.
But the outcome of that decree is that today, instead of Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines being one and the same building, the Shinto shrine is an outbuilding just outside the Buddhist temple. They still aren't separate enough that putting one inside the other's temple grounds is a problem.
(Wikipedia:
"However, the process of separation stalled by 1873, the government's intervention in support of the order was relaxed, and even today the separation is still only partially complete: many major Buddhist temples retain small shrines dedicated to tutelary Shinto kami, and some Buddhist figures, such as the Bodhisattva Kannon, are revered in Shinto shrines."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinbutsu_bunri )
> The Imperial Family was also a religious role and was considered to semi-divine.
None of that is incompatible with some of the family being Christian, as long as they also avow Shinto. The Pope might object to that - it's not good Christianity from a Western perspective. But why would the Japanese care?
I understand that Christianity is very trendy in South Korea.
The Japanese constitution is very intentionally based on Western governments, both the original 1890 version and the post WW2 revisions. It's as much a relic of Western christian society influence as any Western constitution is. I'm not as familiar with other asian countries but I imagine it would be similar? Constitutions as a concept didn't come into vogue without Western influence.
I do not think Brunei, Saudi, or the Emirates are actually all that open. Egypt and Turkey are more open than the oil-rich states
Would you accept Space Catholicism? I’m still working out the particulars.
Sounds like a job for Frank Herbert. (Or L. Ron Hubbard if you're feeling extra crazy.)
I think there are beautiful and dutiful ways of basing new things on ancient things. But we get stuck in traditions that at the time made sense and were fitting but we’re dancing to a different part of the music now and we have to learn the next part.
The “Canticle for Leibowitz” author went from ending his book with space Catholicism to being an atheist by the sequel, though perhaps the real thing will be more stable.
I might do a response piece to this but there’s no such thing as a “stable” institution, only institutions that are reliably reborn and able to adapt. Kinda like ol’ JC himself. There’s no future that won’t require our courage. Nor would I want that future.
An excellent point, one I wish people more deeply understood. Life span of an institution is like the life span of a cell: too short, something was broken; too long, it is probably cancerous. It needs to live long enough to serve its purpose, then die off when it is completed or the cell is no longer functioning well.
Capitalism's one great virtue is a standardized mechanism for killing off no-longer-functional institutions, while permitting the people who participated in them to mostly survive and go on to contribute elsewhere.
That doesn't work with religion, well at least the sort than have omniscient beings that express their preferences. If you start with the premise from the believer that their religion is as true as gravity or air, it doesn't and shouldn't change as it's infallible. Adaptation implies fallibility and a fallible religion isn't worth following in the face of competition even if you are a true believer hence the ease at which polytheistic fallible religion are supplanted. There is a reason monotheism came to dominate the world with the only hold outs really being agnosticism masquerading as religion such as Buddhism or Hinduism.
Empirically, infallibility isn't the only thing that attracts believers to religions. "True enough" is often sufficient. There will always be aspects that you're not allowed to doubt, but most religions keep that stuff out of the way of managing daily life. Not all of them (the few that have eternities meddling in everyday affairs could justly be called the "totalitarian" subtype) but most do explicitly leave room for change, emphasize that the universe is mysterious in some ways i.e. leave some parts of the map empty.
I think that is all perfectly natural and suspect that only someone memetically poisoned by the totalitarian subtype would think the gentler types are "agnosticism masquerading as religion".
See my response a couple down; I would expand upon it here but the gist is mostly the same so I won't. The only thing I would add is nothing attracts anyone to any religion once a person is religious as by definition there can only be one true religion hence given the supposition of true belief, attraction is irrelevant. Either you lose faith in your religion (which isn't possible in monotheism unless you become atheist / apostacy), get convinced a variant of it is better (i.e. heresy/apostacy), or (if you are polytheistic) decide the new god is better and you move to them (which is normal as polytheism is generally one of God_shopping_of_the_week) but then have to live under their new (monotheistic) rules because that is what the new super god requires if you want his support. Polytheistic religions are for all sakes and purposes "I can believe/do whatever I want because ultimately it doesn't matter because over infinite cycles I will always win", i.e. agnosticism dressed up with rituals and incense.
I’m not sure I believe this but can remember when I believed something close to this. Circumstances change. The same principles apply but their application looks different.
WTF Hinduism is not "agnosticism". There are monotheistic and polytheistic Hindus, but most of them are certainly not "agnostic". Either polytheism or ditheism make a lot more sense (to me, anyway) than monotheism does, and I have no more problem accepting a fallible religion than I have accepting the scientific method (which is also, obviously, fallible). Omniscience doesn't really make any sense either since it conflicts with free will.
Monotheism dominates the world because Western Europeans and Arabs/Turks were good at killing people and conquering territory, that's about it. Not because it makes more ideological or theological sense.
Of course they are agnostic in a real sense as the gods are irrelevant outside the immediacy of your cycle, i.e. they have no impact over eternity as eventually everyone reaches Nirvana or Buddhist annihilation. There is no path that doesn't result in you ultimately succeeding in the reincarnation or enlightenment endgame over infinite cycles. Some just reach it sooner than others hence the gods are literally irrelevant outside your current cycle, they can't prevent you from reaching the end state hence what you truly have is agnosticism, i.e. "I believe in the gods like I believe in my boss at work, they can make my life in the now better or worse and I can selective choose between them via the flavor of the week because ultimately it doesn't matter, I can live my life however I want because over eternity some future cycle self will get it right"
As for the last paragraph, not at all. The world was being dominated by polytheist people long before Christianity and Islam came to dominate the modern world so you have to ask yourself why it is those conquered people were so quick to convert rather than just die like Christians and Muslims for their god. The answer is because in a polytheistic world when Abrahamic God (hereafter God) shows up he is accepted as legitimate "just another god to add to the pantheon" but when you pray to Odin (Shiva, Huitzilopochtli , the flying spaghetti monster, the Emperor, whoever) time and time again while your enemy prays to God but he (Odin or your former big man on the block) keeps failing to deliver as you lose on the battlefield time and time again, you simply start praying to the new god (God) who actually can deliver as is apparent to all your dead friends because why stick with an obvious inferior and weak god who is nothing but a failure in the face of the new god on the block. And that new god is jealous so you have to give up on the god_of_the_week(tm) and so you forget your old ways and your kids become true believers. But that's OK because God delivers over his prima farcie inferior peers hence why you were conquered. Once again, the supposition is true belief, not science, hence the only that matters to the outcome of the battle is whose god is more powerful hence worthy of worship if you are polytheistic.
First time I read *Dune*, I got the impression Zensunni and the O.C. Bible were the products of thousands of years of institutional evolution. They fit right in thematically. Arrakis shaped the Fremen, the Bene Gesserit shaped their Kwisatz Haderach, so galactic politics had to shape religion, right?
Second time, I happened to see their description in the glossary. It turns out an ecumenical council did it in one stroke. I was so disappointed.
No, not at all. Zensunni developed over thousands of years. The OC Bible was the end result of a council after the Butlerian Jihad, which was galactic politics.
The anti-AI faction prevailed in the Butlerian Jihad, making a new faith necessary for reasons similar to the "Cultural Christian" argument. They needed something universal to provide meaning that would prevent anything that could lead to AI.
So they created the OC Bible with its main commandment of "Thou shalt not create a machine in the likeness of the human mind," truly wise words we should all live by.
Wait, Herbert mentions the Orange Catholic Bible but never says anything about the Orange Catholic Pope, who would presumably be a huge player...
He was much more interested in mashing names of incompatible religions together than actually trying to parse out any doctrine.
There was the Orange Catholic Bible yes, but the Fremen apparently followed "Zensunni", which is also a mashup.
Unsurprising since his characters were not particularly devout in anything other than following a messiah, i.e. all devout characters were members of a cult of personality.
Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous With Rama has the "Church of Jesus Christ; Cosmonaut".
Or John C. Wright. A scene cut from the volume "The Hermetic Millennia" from "Count to a Trillion/The Eschaton Sequence":
https://scifiwright.com/2013/05/lunar-sacrament-of-conciliation/
Lunar Sacrament of Conciliation
“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been two hundred eighty five years since my last confession.”
And with these words, the dark figure sank to his knees onto the sub-zero lunar surface.
Reyes was happy that a mask was blocking his expression. This was the last thing he would have expected. Slowly he stood and slowly made the sign of the cross in above the hooded head of the kneeling figure. “In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Speak and ease your burden. Of what sins do you accuse yourself, my son?”
“Monstrous sins, both done, and sins I have in contemplation.”
“Sins not yet committed cannot be absolved. List your past sins that you repent. To repent means to turn away from them, and to avoid the occasions where they may tempt you again.”
“I have murdered all the Hermeticists, and spared only you five, of whom I have need.”
Reyes was aware of the wild feeling of supremacy, as if he had passed a test all his fellows had flunked; but he was also ashamed of this feeling. “Murder? They were victims of augmentation accidents. Unexpected divarifications, logic loops, Turing halt states … You need not to confess mere feelings of guilt where no real guilt obtains, my son.”
“It is a sin of omission. I ran the specifications to see what would be needed for a human brain to be correctly carried both into emulation, as with Exarchel, and into augmentation, as with me. I was able to reverse-engineer some steps of Rania’s work, and make guesses about others. And I knew they would fail. I knew they were weak. I could have stopped them with a command; I could have interfered with their experiments; I could have merely showed them my results of my trial runs I ran on your ghosts which my Exarchel has consumed. I know the secret. Or part of it.”
…“Ah! But you are wondering whether, as more and more people create upload copies of themselves, immortal upload copies, how soon it will be before the whole world is devoted to one electronic nirvana, a paradise of unreality? How can the Darwinian process continue unless the useless eaters of bread and the useless consumers of power die back? This involves my second horde of sins, the one I have not yet committed.”
Reyes was so elated hearing that he was to achieve posthuman greatness, that he almost did not hear what Del Azarchel was saying.
Reyes sobered. “My son! If you yet intend to do these sins, then you have no firm purpose of amendment, and have not repented of them.”
“I repent that they are necessary.”
…“The sins I contemplate and have committed is murder by the thousands and tens of thousand, murder by the millions, that the base stock of humanity be culled. The Hylics must die, of course. It would not be right to have allowed the Hermeticists to be decimated, without forcing the common people to suffer the same risks, and die at the same ratios. I mean to destroy nine parts of mankind in order that one tenth might survive and prosper, and become the seed of posthumanity. Without this, the Hyades will overwhelm Earth in the One Hundred and Tenth Century.”
Reyes y Pastor felt a disquieting sensation, like sickness in himself. “You are speaking of the cusp nexus occurring at the next crisis interval in our calculations? The calculation you showed us cast the genocide in terms of a hypothetical, assuming a continuing energy crisis against demographic shifts…”
“Ah. I also wish to confess the sins of bearing false witness. I have systematically falsified data fed to the Hermetic Order. The cliometric calculations show that cusp to be inevitable.”
Father Reyes wanted to wipe the cold sweat from his face, but this, of course, is one of the things one cannot do in a vacuum mask. “It is not inevitable if you repent of it.”
“It is inevitable because I have decreed it so. Once the rod-logic diamonds in all the cities of Earth have achieved a certain critical mass, I intend to coat the biosphere with Aurum Vitae, and reduce any organisms not needed in the neural net to more useful elements. Montrose’s only possible countermove is something he would not dare to do, since to destroy the computer mainframes of an entire world—by a decade from now, it will be world utterly dependent on emulation technology for both government and economic control functions—would be to trigger global collapse, leading to the same outcome.”
…The small part of his mind reminded him of the duties of his office. Reluctantly, he said, “It is an abuse of this sacrament to pretend to confess a crime not yet committed, nor can it be absolved. While within the seal of the confessional, you stand to me in the relation of son to father, because I speak with the voice of the Father and in His place while I act within His will—It is within my power to charge you and compel you not to do this act. By mortal sin a man excommunicates himself from Church, and from hope of salvation! Look in your conscience. You know what you intend is evil, an enormity beyond reckoning! Swear not to carry through with this! Swear upon your hope of heaven!”
Del Azarchel stood. “I have no need of heaven to house my soul, if I achieve physical immortality through the posthumanification process. I shall endure in one form or another for as long as this universe. Such a thing is not beyond my grasp…”
…But he also had his pride as an intellectual, as an academic, as a Hermeticist.
The common muck of mankind deserved death—was that not the general doom decreed for all Adam’s children? How would an act of genocide to decimate all the lands of Earth be so different from the Great Flood of Noah? It was practically the same as doing the work of the Lord, merely by other, and more efficient means.
And a loving God would not expect a man, especially a man of such superior intelligence as Reyes y Pastor, not to do anything necessary, commit any crime, forsake any oath, to preserve the human race in its new and inhuman form that Darwin demanded, so as to oppose the descent of the Hyades? Of course not. The Father knew all, and forgave all.
…“But of course—” his voice was hoarse, his mouth unexpectedly dry, “You also have the duty imposed by history to save mankind. Darwin makes certain demands upon us, and it is entirely within keeping with, ah, with common sense, that a man must do what is needed to preserve the race. Even if that means changing the race to something unthinkable.”
Del Azarchel moved one leg, so that he was upon one knee, not both, as if he were about to rise up. “What is this? You are a man of the cloth. It is your business to talk me out of this. Tell me of the hellfire.”
Reyes y Pastor begged in his heart to his heart for forgiveness, but with his lips he said, “The talk of hell in the Holy Scripture is meant to be metaphorical. All the enlightened and progressive thinkers agree. It is literary device to represent the burning flames of the conscience. Of course, as a being superior to human beings, your conscience should be evolved to the level beyond good and evil, as befits you.”
“Odd that you would say so. The more intelligent the augmentation makes me, the more logical and inevitable venerable ideas like hellfire seem. Almost as grim and inevitable as a cliometric calculation.”
“A loving God could not create a hell.”
“A loving God must have some place to put those exiles who reject His love, souls to whom the fires of that love are pain, because they hate it. Will you betray your own office, your oath of priesthood, everything, to counsel me to commit this deed? I was expecting the opposite from you.”
Reyes y Pastor turned up his oxygen gain and drew a deep breath. “My son, despite all your intelligence, your heart is clouded. Listen to me. Do you know how Benaiah the son of Jehoiada served King Solomon, wisest of the wise? He fell upon Joab while Joab was clinging to the horn of the altar, begging for mercy and demanding sanctuary. All this was done at the King’s commandment. And are you not wiser, in your augmented state, than Solomon ever was?”
Del Azarchel said softly, “It is the memory of Captain Ranier Grimaldi that haunts you. We mutinied and murdered him, in order to use his body for the raw materials to make Rania, and find a way to come home again. Your hands are bloodied as well as mine. How can bloodstained hands touch the Eucharist, or lave me in the water that absolves of sin?”
Reyes said blandly, “The doctrine of ex opere operato as first explicated by St. Augustine during the Donatist heresy makes clear that the individual impurities of the Episcopal officer do not impede the power of the sacrament coming through the office. Christ can absolve sins through me, polluted as I am. There is but one question here.”
“Ask it.”
“The genocide of man you have decreed, the mass extinctions—”
“Yes?”
“Does victory rest on the other side of them?”
Del Azarchel said, “Then you will absolve me of the evil I do if good comes of it?”
“No, my son. The sacrament of confession cannot be used in this way. As a priest and ghostly father I can do nothing for you. But I am also an Hermeticist, one of the rare to survive the expedition to the Diamond Star, and one of the even more rare to have survived the baptism of fire you ignited. And I say that Darwin will absolve you, for the process of evolution is the process that, through evils produces good, and through death, life. Rise up from this cold and lifeless dust! The penance I impose upon you is that you shall succeed in being the savior of mankind, and save the race from the Hyades. You shall not fail! Nor shall we fail you. You are right to demand we call you master, for we have no hope of salvation outside you.”
Love the Eschaton Sequence - it starts off and looks purely Manichean, and then takes an unexpected turn into Gnosticism.
The James Blish or Mary Doria Russell Space Catholics?
Neither ended that well.
Is this by any chance based on CS Lewis' space trilogy? He wasn't Catholic, but the concept seems close enough.
Only if it involves lesbian necromancers and cows.
I understood that reference!
What is it? Pratchett?
The Locked Tomb, by Tamsyn Muir.
I would define space catholicism as the views intellectual catholics would hold 2000 years from now. How does the content of Christianity change as the context from which Christianity was born becomes more distant? That is, the answer to this question: what religious claims still make sense when removed from their original context and how do they develop so as to continue transmission? That's one thing that makes Unsong a great book, besides the puns. Unsong develops answers to ancient metaphysical questions in a modern context, and does so within a synthesis of traditions new and old.
One sideline of this is what Catholicism looks like when the Pope is 30 light years away and the only interaction is occasional Papal Bulls being sent at lightspeed, and maybe occasional doctrinal questions being sent toward the Vatican. The Church has lived in a world where the Vatican was very far away and communications and orders were very expensive and slow, so probably it could adapt.
Is the Space Pope reptilian?
I Dated A Robot looks pretty good now.
I once wrote a story about space catholic Spaniards vs. space ottomans.
Don John of Austria has loosed the second stage!
Did the Space Hussars charge at the Space Janissaries to save the planet Vienna?
Not exactly. But Spaniards had space cruisers named like "Our Lady of Africa" and "Pius XII".
All rocket ships should look like mitres.
Space Catholicism is just normal Catholicism. Plenty of Catholics in the aerospace industry. We don't need new religions. We need to understand that Christianity isn't a religion that's stuck in the past. It has always been about getting back to the future.
While the Imperial Cult [1] of Warhammer 40k is likely incompatible with Catholicism on the finer points, it nevertheless shares some similarity with medieval or early modern Catholicism:
* Strong endorsement of a feudal society structure
* Centrally controlled doctrine
* Belief in a god who walked among men
* Little tolerance approach to heterodox thought
* The common folks are not required to study theology in detail (contrast with Judaism)
* Aesthetic similarities (but with more skulls)
Of course, all of these features are shared with orthodox Christianity, and probably a lot of religious branches beside that.
[1] https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Imperial_Cult
Seeing Christian conservatives use Warhammer imagery has always been kind of amusing in the way that the God-Emperor is very close to being a literal Antichrist figure.
George RR Martin has done a short story on this, with a lizard-like space bishop! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_of_Cross_and_Dragon
Available for free online.
https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-way-of-cross-and-dragon/
It's spectacularly good.
"[We] believe in no afterlife, no God. We see the universe as it is, Father Damien, and these naked truths are cruel ones. We who believe in life, and treasure it, will die. Afterward there will be nothing, eternal emptiness, blackness, nonexistence. In our living there has been no purpose, no poetry, no meaning. Nor do our deaths possess these qualities. When we are gone, the universe will not long remember us, and shortly it will be as if we had never lived at all. Our worlds and our universe will not long outlive us. Ultimately, entropy will consume all, and our puny efforts cannot stay that awful end. It will be gone. It has never been. It has never mattered. The universe itself is doomed, transient, uncaring.”
Babylon 5 already did it
Have you read Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead, and Xenocide? They're full of Space Catholics. Nothing but Space Catholics.
I think the REAL intended message is more anti-non-Christianity (read as: Islamism).
Why do you think that?
"Why I am now a Christian: Atheism can't equip us for civilisational war"
https://unherd.com/2023/11/why-i-am-now-a-christian/
fairly conclusive haha, wonder if they'll reply
I was wondering why Shankar thought that though
Basically the same, though while the post mentioned Ayaan specifically, and she has been explicit about her reasons, Dawkins and Richard Spencer have said similar things, and their reasons are slightly less obvious.
Gotcha, interesting.
Soviet Communism did fine for itself in WWII without being theistic. Also, everyone thinks the US is a decadent paper tiger until we prove them wrong.
It did fine for itself in WWII, but is kind of famous for dying out and being replaced by a different culture.
Soviets did give more freedom to religion during WW2 compared to before and after.
Arguably, it didn't do as well as it could have. According to a somewhat dubious source I didn't independently verify, the USSR was preparing for a massive war, had the strongest army in the world with lots and lots of quite modern (if not always top-notch) aircraft and tanks, and produced 5 times more oil than Germany ever had access to. And then it all collapsed faster and harder than France, and the only thing that saved Stalin's ass was that the USSR was somewhat bigger than France and he had time to try a few more things. (Including going easier on religion for a while, by the way.) The somewhat dubious source claims that most people simply didn't feel like fighting for the regime. Although there were enough reasons to hate it besides atheism, so no idea how much of the low morale (if the claim is correct) can be explained by it.
Having a literal genocidal army invading your homeland does wonders for morale.
The homeland regime was genocidal too, while the genocide by the Germans was mostly against the Jews whose support among the rest of the Soviet people was ambiguous at best (Ukrainians had carried out their own Jewish genocide a generation ago).
Communism is basically a religion, complete with its holy men, its scripture, its heresies, and its eschatology.
Soviet Communism did fine because it had most of the emotional trappings of religion: it had its holy doctrine, saints, prophets, rituals and codified definitions of sins. It passed the point of a cult of personality and became just a cult of a mythologized Batyushka Stalin, the Man of Steel.
It worked a bit like that in every Socialst Republic. I remember my own Babcia reverently hanging the picture of the First Chairman Of the Party right next to a Crucifix, not entirely decided which Messiah to follow and hedging her spiritual bets.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes:
"That legacy consists of an elaborate set of ideas and institutions designed to safeguard human life, freedom and dignity — from the nation state and the rule of law to the institutions of science, health and learning. As Tom Holland has shown in his marvellous book Dominion, all sorts of apparently secular freedoms — of the market, of conscience and of the press — find their roots in Christianity."
This blog post argues otherwise:
https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/the-ottoman-origins-of-modernity
Its thesis: Christianity (what we'd now call Catholicism) was a repressive force for hundreds of years. Secular freedom only came into the picture with the emergence of a successful heresy (Protestantism) + the need for Catholicism and Protestantism to unite against an external foe.
To be fair, I suppose one could argue that before the Reformation, most Christians weren't actually reading the Bible, and once they started reading the Bible, they realized the importance of secular freedoms.
I agree. Basically, if you don't want any Muslims in your country, you have two options. Well, three:
1. Discriminate against Muslims specifically. This is going to upset a lot of Muslim countries.
2. Discriminate against all religions (state atheism). In a country that is not majority atheist this is going to upset a lot of citizens.
3. Discriminate against non-Christians, but accept even superficial Christianity.
Muslim countries can't protest against 3, because they usually discriminate against non-Muslims themselves. Option 3 will upset outspoken atheists, especially if implemented in the Malaysian style ("a Pole is someone who is Catholic, habitually speaks Polish and conforms to Polish customs"), but you can dial in the level of discrimination by doing something like: "Germany is a secular country and shall make no concessions to religious customs, but, acknowledging its Christian heritage, will not abolish existing support for national traditions and customs of Christian origin" and happily ban elective circumcision, muezzin calls to prayer, face coverings (except carnival masks, of course) and sprinkle bacon crumbs on every school meal.
you can discriminate on ethno-national grounds and ancestry, which in practice is going to close off Muslim migration, although of course it won't stop ethnic Poles from converting to Islam.
a possible 4th solution is to decisively discriminate against all the violations of human rights, public health, public good and personal freedoms religions require to exist, without discriminating against the religions themselves. If the government was really keen on dishing out justice to people who violate the law for religious reasons, the religions would be defanged pretty quickly, and become mere mannerisms.
For example, if the policy is to tolerate absolutely no child abuse, ever, be it physical, mental, emotional or otherwise, and punish abusive parents with extreme severity, religion tends to erode the moment the children of religious parents find out they can just refuse to go to the temple and not face any consequences for it.
A fundamental part of religion, one needed for its survival is the ability to punish people for quitting, or trying to quit. If the government is happy to put you in prison for religious enforcement, then religious enforcement ends pretty quickly.
Do you think abuse is the only consequence parents have in their toolbox for enforcing rules? How do you think parents ought to respond to a kid who refuses to go to school or the doctor?
while i find the rebuttal persuasive, i have never heard anyone make this argument, and scott doesn’t give any examples of people making this argument. i guess it’s good to have considered one additional argument in favour of not being a conservative christian.
My thought as well. I thought there was going to be something about why it's good to celebrate Christmas even if you don't believe in Jesus or whatever, but it doesn't get into that much detail.
My guess is that this is really a straw argument masquerading as a real one, like the post Scott included in the links for last month that had some really interesting stuff about cultural explanations of declining birth rate, but then had two paragraphs at the end trying to smuggle in "and therefore we should accept the radical right-wing views on the following 15 topics".
Maybe this form of argument is common in a kind of neo-trad movement that is adjacent to anti-woke tech-center-right-ism?
I think it's a pretty common belief, see my direct reply to Sam
I'm a deist, not an atheist per se, but I've heard the cultural Christianity argument coming out of my own mouth. In my case, the cultural Christianity argument makes sense because I don't care about classical liberalism. And I don't have any blanket condemnation of theocracies. It depends on the theocracy.
Scott lives in the Bay Area of California and the discourse in Bay Area is a unique beast.
Ah yes, that post from Becoming Noble substack. It is a classic of the genre of hooking you in and then putting the radical stuff at the end. He literally proposes keeping young women uneducated and promoting teen pregnancy! I mean, he’s not wrong that it correlates with fertility (single greatest predictive variable through history for fertility rate is percentage of girls who leave formal education before age 15) but like damn.
Anecdotal, but I've definitely heard this argument made in Christian vs atheist debates.
He gave the example of Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
Yeah, but even this example is mistaken. Hirsi Ali is not a cultural Christian, but an actual Christian and she suggests actual Christianity instead of cultural Christianity: https://www.christiantoday.com/article/ayaan.hirsi.alis.powerful.conversion/141801.htm
"Ayaan gave a powerful response that Christianity had led to the "flourishing of Western civilization"....."""Everything that we inherited from [Christian faith], it's just too casual to cast that aside. When we've done it, I think we have caused ourselves a great deal of damage." Both are standard 'atheists should embrace cultural Christianity' tropes. Scott isn't saying proponents themselves are only 'cultural' Christians, though his sentence about where Hirsi is 'sort of coming from' is open to interpretation.
This argument has definitely become more common in Christian/atheist debates and especially related to Tom Holland’s book Dominion. Alex O’Connor is particularly annoyed by this argument but for different reasons than Scott (https://unherd.com/2024/06/the-trouble-with-political-christianity/).
Ironically, Tom Holland’s book actually ends up agreeing with Scott’s point in the last chapter (titled “Woke”) by suggesting that modern progressivism is the product of a Christian mindset that everyone has without noticing it ("This is Water").
This is a very common argument/belief in evangelical Christian circles, at least in my personal experience (was raised in devout Christian family, most of my family members and people I knew growing up were and continue to remain Christians, and most of them believe some version of this). I also wouldn't be surprised if Mormons and conservative Catholics believed something like this too, but I've had much less interaction with those groups.
Edit: it actually can go much further than this. Once again, this is my personal experience, but I was raised to believe (and still know many people who believe) that things secular people think of as Enlightenment values (rationality, tolerance, etc.) and even the scientific method came out of Christian culture. So, the theory goes, if you live in the west it's ultimately Christianity you can thank for the vaccines keeping you alive while you play video games on a supercomputer you can hold in your hand in a relatively tolerant, open society.
One final thought: another more secular example of someone who's argued something like this is Tyler Cowen. He doesn't advocate people lie and say Christianity is true if they don't believe it, but across blog posts he's certainly gestured towards the general idea that things we (including, maybe especially secular people) appreciate come from Christianity. The examples I can think of off the top of my head he's mentioned are the Christian influence on the abolitionist movement, and the general advice he's given that if people want to be happy they should be "more Mormon" (no drinking, get married, have children, etc.)
There's a nuance here, in that even if you don't accept Christianity *caused* all this stuff, you might be able to accept that it provided the meaning, purpose and good will toward men that allowed us to get on with it--and that if you take it away, it gets replaced with stuff that absolutely does not allow us to get on with it.
This seems to be the exact argument the article is arguing against.
Not sure what you mean. You could mean a couple different things.
He argues against asserting the doctrines out of practicality (unrelated), and argues that an attempt to prop up Christainity may just end in the same place (mostly unrelated). If you're saying the latter implicitly accepts a closer link between Christianity and western ideas than just non-interference... my point is that it can be necessary without being sufficient.
From the article: "But the Cultural Christians would argue that such a flowering of culture and optimism could only happen within a generation or two of a Christian society."
You write: "you might be able to accept that it provided the meaning, purpose and good will toward men that allowed us to get on with it"
These seem to be the same premise; I'm not sure how else to read it. "Christianity provided the cultural basis for these things." Is this not what both are saying?
The first is the possibility that Christianity caused them. The second is the possibility that it just kind of didn't interfere (but fills a need normally filled by things that do interfere).
Not a massive distinction, but an outline of how it could be important even if you don't see a causal connection.
That seems to be the claim, but I think it gets things backwards. It is very plausible to me that Christianity gave an initial set of ideas that caused this stuff to develop, but it seems very implausible to me that these ideas couldn’t be sustained on their own terms.
Looking at the actual history of the ideas, I don't find that argument plausible. The ideas were either present or being developed before Christianity had ever been heard of.
OTOH, I do find that an essentially idle aristocracy was probably necessary. Also urban centers.
Christianity was, at best, an only slightly resistive medium. And it wasn't always only slightly resistive. (Usually, though, for political reasons, so one can argue that any other centralized power would have been nearly as bad.)
The ideas can be "sustained" in the sense of remaining logical or coherent, but they aren't a religion. The religious void has this way of getting filled.
Is there any reason to believe that Christianity is a safer religion to fill this void with than, say, Buddhism, or Norse paganism, or Unitarian Universalism, or Scientology, or Baha'i, or whatever?
Perhaps, but it's moot since we're talking about the value of supporting a pre-existing Christian tradition in western society. You can't ride Buddhist inertia that isn't there.
I don't think you can truly fill the void with Christianity in the long run, to be clear. I think true believers will keep declining.
I can’t help thinking it might have something to do with having become the official religion of the Roman Empire. It was a very successful merger.
If it was memetically unfit, it would have died with the empire. But it didn't.
It clearly wasn't memetically unfit, but I think that most modern analysis of *what* offered Christianity notable memetic fitness fails to account for the fact that evangelism was not a common feature of religions at the time, but an exceptional feature which set Christianity apart in its environment. Most discussions I've followed take for granted the assumption that contemporary religions were competing for followers, and Christianity won the competition, but the position I've heard represented more among religious historians is that other contemporary religions were, for the most part, not actively competing for followers.
It's very non-coincidental that most religious people today practice evangelistic religions, from a starting point where evangelistic religions were the exception. But I think centering the discussion on the religion's moral values, and pretending that it was playing the same kind of game as its competitors, is probably glossing over the most important feature.
I don't guess it made it to the Roman world, but wasn't Buddhism evangelical? Certainly it spread very rapidly across a big chunk of the world!
Buddhism is, as far as I'm aware, the first evangelical religion in history, and it experienced a rapid spread for similar reasons. But Christianity has one major distinction from Buddhism in terms of memetic fitness, and that's its exclusivity. Buddhism was highly syncretic, and tended to pick up additional gods and cosmology everywhere it spread to. In many cases, Buddhism essentially became an additional feature within other preexisting religious cosmologies. In contrast, Christianity packaged in the idea that other types of religious belief and worship were actively wrong and harmful, and needed to be replaced. So while Buddhism had a similarly rapid spread, it didn't replace other local religious beliefs to the same extent.
Oh of course, the moral values are basically irrelevant. This is about restoring order and power to our society.
It was successful at becoming a state religion, but that greatly increased the amount of political infighting, to the point that a large chunk of history of the Eastern Roman Empire is about obscure and yet vicious theological disputes between bishops of different cities.
A monotheistic religion that made claims of being universal had some downsides in an era when religious tolerance hadn't been invented yet.
Well, yeah, they had to duke it out (still happening), but let’s face it, being aligned with the center of power is an advantage don’t you think? God and gods have been going from many to one for quite a while. Is it called vertical integration in business school terminology?
Advantage for whom in what competition, though? It was good for the meme since it outcompeted other religions using state power. Though, Christianity spread pretty rapidly on its own, despite state suppression. Was it good for the state? Hard to say, since the Roman Empire was pretty successful with a different state religion. Was it good for the people? I guess it depends on which people we're talking about. Most people in the empire were poor farmers or slaves both before and after Christianity became a state religion.
My only point is, that it was good for Christianity as an institution.
Who else it was good for is a matter of endless argument.
>in an era when religious tolerance hadn't been invented yet.
This made me chuckle..
The Eastern Roman Empire wasn't brought down by those disputes but by the challenge of countries aligned with another competing monotheistic religion.
They lasted over a thousand years, so I’m not sure if it makes sense to focus on how it ended. But from a modern perspective, there was an inability to fix ongoing problems. Picking a new emperor: never really solved, often violent. An insistence on religious uniformity despite disagreements resulted in often violent internal politics. (This foreshadows the religious wars after the Protestant Reformation.)
Unsurprisingly, most of the things Christianity gets falsely praised for, are simply long term outcomes of Roman and Greek thought permeating the culture. Its not about Jesus, its about Socrates.
What does the group of people who think this expect liberal atheists to do?
Is it as Scott suggests, go through the motions of being Christian, or is it something more along the lines of dont wage the war on Christmas. Revel in christian traditions and dont fight its influence on society (the latter doesnt seem to require much lieing)
Based on my admittedly sketchy understanding of fin de siecle England, I think it's the former: AIUI the Anglican Church (and Church attendance in general) had and has no real "teeth" in the sense of being an oppressive, totalizing theology (I forget who it was who observed that ironically, by making it a state religion, it essentially guaranteed that it was always going to be a social club first and a religion second, because there would never be any selection effect for committed religiosity), and instead provided a pleasant space to hang around in for an hour every Sunday while developing a sense of local community and reflecting on being charitable. But the thing is, you (and everyone else) still have to actually *go* to gain those benefits, instead of staying home and watching the footie.
It's like the cultural-values version of Type 2 fun.
Sir Humphrey Appleby: The Queen is inseparable from the Church of England.
Jim Hacker: And what about God?
Sir Humphrey Appleby: I think he is what is called an optional extra.
Stop suing bakers who won't make gay cakes. Don't tell people who don't want porn in their kids library that they are book burning Nazis.
Oppose many interpretations of "civil rights". Support freedom of association for Christians.
Oppose immigration, especially of non-Christians (its quite obvious that a lot of this boils down to don't let Europe get flooded with low IQ muslims that turn it into a caliphate).
Allow universal school vouchers so Christians can teach their kids their values.
But those are all just basic conservative positions, with nothing specifically Christian about them. If the conclusion of the argument Scott's responding to is merely "be a conservative" then it's a terrible argument. It tries to prove too much (much more than necessary). "Because Christianity is awesome, you should defend religious freedom and Western values" implies (semantically not logically) that if you *don't* think Christianity is awesome you *shouldn't* defend those things. When actually you don't need to be Christian (cultural or otherwise) to see their value.
I'm not an atheist, but it should be blindingly obvious that atheism does not require leftism, and in fact the qualities atheism is usually taken to champion (reason, independent thought, freedom of speech) are entirely incompatible with leftism.
FWIW, I *don't* think Christianity is awesome. The best claim that might be defensible is something along the lines of "given human nature, Christianity keeps something worse from filling the same function", and I think that would be difficult to defend. Christianity not just tolerated, but actively supported pogroms, among other things.
Not 100% onboard with this set of policies, but my objections feel like they're closer to edge-case quibbling than irreconcilable core conflict. If I were locked in a room for a week with an advocate for that agenda, I like to think we'd be able to hammer out some mutually-agreeable compromise.
Probably the biggest sticking point would be that I'd want to ensure equal access to mainstream payment processors and other financial services for sex workers. I'm fine with that sort of thing being clearly labeled, isolated to some extent, and of course keeping kids out... but for somebody who makes their living drawing cartoon tits to have a harder time getting a mortgage, or using Paypal, relative to an equivalently successful professional in some less sex-related field, doesn't help anybody. On the contrary, driving it underground just turns the sector into an attractive nuisance, and utterly unnecessary fertile field for criminal exploitation.
The proper antidote for corruptive, misleading, dangerous porn isn't state-backed repression and abstinence-only ignorance. Gotta sort out some kind of broad societal standard for wholesome, educational, life-affirming porn. Maybe something a little bit like the Comics Code Authority, plus fact-checking from actual scientists? Pretty sure the J-man Himself was willing to deal fairly with prostitutes, and wasn't a fan of letting moneychangers wield too much power.
Those aren't Christian culture, they're policies intended to protect a Christian minority from being bulldozed by a non-Christian majority, or perhaps to protect Christian proles from being bulldozed by non-Christian elites.
I suspect they're policies intended to *help get politicians elected* in areas where many voters are conservative Christians. Nothing more.
Mormons have socially conservative values but they tend not to worry about civilizational decline because, 1. The church is increasingly international in orientation. 2. Mormons have the confidence that they can cohere and survive as a people, whatever happens to their Nation or civilization. And who knows, they may be right about that.
<i>Once again, this is my personal experience, but I was raised to believe (and still know many people who believe) that things secular people think of as Enlightenment values (rationality, tolerance, etc.) and even the scientific method came out of Christian culture.</i>
The scientific method was only formalised once, and that was in an environment where 99% of people were Christian. "The scientific method came out of Christian culture" is a straightforwardly true historical statement.
No. The scientific method is a continuing process of development, that has strong threads reaching back to Aristotle and his companions (and probably before). And there is no particular point where you can say "That's where/when it was created", because it's still being created.
In what way is the scentific method, as opposed to theories developed using the scientific method, "a continuing process of development"?
Are statistical arguments valid? Which ones, and how valid?
This is still being developed. The solution will probably require doing away with the concept of "truth' and replacing it with a term meaning something like "a model consistent with all the reliable data that we have access to".
That's just off the top of my head. There are other similar topics, and currently different sciences have different rules for what constitutes "the scientific method". The experimental sciences use methods that are very different from the observational science.
That’s not the case. Philosophy is not science. the scientific revolution is generally seen to have started in Europe in around the 17C
revolution, yes, but EVOLUTION of science started with Thales of Miletus.
I, also, was raised to believe lots of lies. People who live in cities are inherently more tolerant than those who live in small communities, because they have to get along with a wider divergence of different people. So that's one source of tolerance. (In past times, most people lived in agricultural [i.e., small] communities. And speed of communication also needs to be factored in, though there you don't have the feedback of "if you're too obnoxious, we'll kill you".)
Rationality dates back to some time before the Hellenic (or is it Hellenistic?) period. Probably lots before, but the records dwindle away. And the scientific method can be traced back that far too, though it was still being developed, so it hadn't been fully developed. Possibly the scientific method is the result of Alexander encouraging communication between Greek and Hindi philosophers. (I'm not sure they were Hindus as we understand the term.)
Just because you were raised with a belief doesn't justify holding that belief as an adult.
"People who live in cities are inherently more tolerant than those who live in small communities"
I think if you poll both populations on their support for hate speech laws and cancel culture, regulations on the minute operations of businesses, whether you need permission to cut down a tree on your property, whether you're allowed to not make a particular requested cake, you'd find that's not remotely true.
lol.
Reporting this comment for being (a) rude (b) contentless (c) maximally low-effort (d) utterly unsubstantiated (e) contributing nothing to the discussion and (f) far below the expected standards here.
Wait, are you reporting me (presumably in the hopes I am sanctioned) for expressing my beliefs in a way you find… intolerable?
Using expected social standards to demand I be socially punished for the psychological stress of my laughing at your beliefs?
How woke of you.
Rationality goes back to at least Ancient Egypt 5-6kya (4k BCE), because they had not-matched-for-thousands of years complex multi-step chemistry that gave them various dyes, pigments, and blue faience.
This is on top of smelting and metallurgy, astronomy, math, and geometry.
I don't think you can really make that claim on that basis. (There are others.) Multi-step processes that are refined over multiple generations can be achieved via pattern matching, with no rational thought required. OTOH, we can trace the evolution of the pyramid, because the earlier forms are still around (including at least one that fell down). It's easier to argue that rational thought was required to make the transition (especially to the one where the Pharaoh's name was engraved on a sheet of plaster that hid the name of the architect...until after a few years of rain and weather washed the plaster away).
This isn't meant to imply that you are wrong in the assumption that rational thought was involved in the development of, e.g., Egpytian cosmetics and poisons, just that the evidence has eroded away.
That said, there's a very decent argument that rational though is just a special kind of pattern matching, but I don't think it really suffices. I think it also involves developing correspondences between disjoint domains. (Which is why I think pure LLMs can't be rational and can't be true intelligences. But that robots wouldn't be so limited.) I expect that developing this kind of map will be one of the things required to solve the "hallucination" problem. (It will also need an adversarial censor...though in ineffective one may already be present.)
> So, the theory goes, if you live in the west it's ultimately Christianity you can thank for the vaccines keeping you alive while you play video games on a supercomputer you can hold in your hand in a relatively tolerant, open society.
I suppose we can do that once we finish thanking Islam, and before that the Greeks and Romans. It's a very silly argument.
Richard Dawkins? https://breakpoint.org/richard-dawkins-a-cultural-christian/
Isn't cultural Christianity basically Jordan Peterson's whole deal?
There is also a strong component of self-improvement. Belief in Jesus alone doesn't motivate you to Clean up Your Room™.
Just off the top 'o me head: Ross Douthat and anyone he quotes. The whole First Things roster. Creeps like Adrian Vermeule. Basically, devout Christian pundits and 'intellectuals', who have become vastly more represented in the discourse since Trump, and exponentially more tedious as a result.
Tom Holland's Dominion (https://www.amazon.com/Dominion-Christian-Revolution-Remade-World/dp/0465093507) is a book-length foundation of the argument; not exactly in "you should stay culturally Christian" terms but "here's the ways Christianity shaped what you appreciate about The West" terms.
Douglas Murray identifies as a culturally Christian atheist (https://www.premierchristianity.com/features/douglas-murray-the-anti-woke-atheist-with-a-soft-spot-for-christianity/4427.article). Look for other anti-woke atheists, especially gay British folk.
I stumble on your first block. I can’t honestly vouch for something that I think is a steaming pile.
Otoh, I’m not opposed to using the non-useless parts of Christian ideas. “Love thy neighbour “ and that sort of thing. I think one can use the ideas (since they’re there anyway) without buying the whole ridiculous backstory.
But without at least some parts of the backstory many many people will not willingly buy in to the non-useless parts. And society is so hard to manage when that happens.
I think this is the much stronger argument. There are moralistic behaviours that can potentially make the individual's life worse in any given situation, but that if everyone subscribes to them make everyone's life better (eg. honesty). Christianity is both a Schelling point for collective morality (it's the rules God says it is) and a threatened enforcement mechanism. Absent it, we're sliding towards a world where being privately moral (eg. when no-one will know/you won't suffer negative consequences) is becoming increasingly alien. I'd be inclined to file the growth of utilitarianism and quasi-folk-utilitarianism ("it's not going to hurt anyone") under "collapse of private morality" as well, but I'm conscious some people consider that a good thing.
I am inclined to disagree with you on how strong that argument is. The trouble with the backstory supporting the non-useless parts is that you have to really believe it is true. Believe it down to the blood and bone, the way my 5 year old believes there is a spider in the basement bathroom that will eat her after dark. If you don't have that kind of belief, you are right back to your private morality because the enforcement mechanism becomes a very weak threat, one made weaker by the fact you never see it happen to anyone. Indeed, it is probably the weakest of threats; at least with things like "no one will like you" or "you will go to prison" there are the occasional examples of them actually happening to reference.
I don't think it has to be a very credible threat. I think it has to be an excuse. At the moment, if people who are basically inclined to be moral look around at everyone else not obeying the same rules and ask, "why should I?" "God wants me to," even for a fairly tenuous belief in God, will do as an excuse to obey otherwise-arbitrary moral rules, as will "everyone else does" for the remaining atheists. Probably the sweet spot is "everyone else does," but I think you just need a fairly weak attractor towards morality to counter-balance the creeping entropy of defection.
I think it's more useful to think "God thinks I should" than "God wants me to". God, omnipotently, knows what is best for you and the universe, and gives guidelines that, if followed, tend toward that. So you ought to do what God thinks because you and/or society will be better if you do.
This is coming from an atheistic viewpoint. The Bible's commandments have been tried and found useful through history, so we know they work well for society by experience. If there were things wrong, they would not have survived this long. And maybe the first commandments were different, and evolved to their current state, which has now been stable for hundreds of years.
>This is coming from an atheistic viewpoint. The Bible's commandments have been tried and found useful through history, so we know they work well for society by experience.
In what sense? An institution can be stable without necessarily being good for human happiness. The institution of slavery was longer-lived than Christianity has been so far, so in a sense it certainly "worked," but that doesn't mean either that we could stably return to it in a modern environment, or that it ever made humans happier on net.
I agree in a sense, but “I won’t be a good person otherwise” is an equally viable excuse. It also benefits from most everyone being pretty sure they exist.
I'm not sure this is true. I think you can also get a lot of sticking to Christian teachings because everyone expects that of you and visibly breaking from them will be socially costly. That seems to be most of the enforcement mechanism of wokism. It is subject to sudden change when the preference falsification cascade collapses, but until then....
Yes, but that doesn't solve the problem of people behaving the right way when no one else is looking or they don't expect to be caught. You are correct that doing what you are supposed to do when it will be visibly obvious that you are not is pretty difficult to break away from, and most people won't (this is what makes e.g. blatant shoplifting such a shocking thing). The challenge for social control is getting people to behave properly when they think no one will know.
This is the part of Jordan Peterson's views that I actually think is correct (if I understand JBP at all, which at times is difficult and not worth the hours/years it might take to deep dive). Stories are powerful and they matter. Where I get off that bus is when those stories are labeled Truth, even if they lead to moderately large coordination gains.
Religious people will also say this about many bible stories. The old nun who taught my RCIA class used to say "The Bible is full of stories, all of them are true and some of them even happened."
There can be value in the story of David and Goliath or the Flood (both favorite stories of my kids when they were small!) even if those things never actually happened. Jesus' parables don't really require that there was ever a dude who owned a vinyard and responded to his tenants killing all the people he sent to demand his rent by sending his son, say.
Yes, there is value. That does not make them true. That’s where I break from JBP
I mean, there is capital-T truth in a lot of literature that nobody thinks is literally true, from the Odyssey to Julius Caesar to Persuasion to Kim to Lord of the Rings to Things Fall Apart. And also there is value in having a set of cultural references that almost everyone knows and that can be used in analogies and discussions easily.
Those are distinct from thinking there was ever actually a great flood that covered the whole Earth with water, or that anyone's wife literally turned into a pillar of salt because she looked back. Or for that matter, that Odysseus really blinded a cyclops or that Gandalf really went head-to-head with a Balrog.
I'm not sure if that's Peterson's point because I haven't read much of his work, but it does capture a couple reasons why reading Old Testament stories can be valuable even though a lot of those stories can't possibly be literally true.
Yes, and I disagree with the use of that word to describe it. Capitalizing it doesn’t help.
Disagree on the definition of true. When I slap a square on the corner of a building, I'm checking to see if it's true, and that's enough to build a building that stands up very well. A scientist with a ultra precision instrument could probably come along and "well, actually" me about that, but if the building stands up well, I'm still correct about that corner being true.
If nothing is actually true because you insist on measuring it in units that are too granular to use, the word means nothing and we get nothing accomplished.
How would you even propose to measure bare metal Truth, anyway?
So, yes, stories/myths can be True.
"True within some tolerance" is not the same as "true due to some cosmic narrative or cultural meme" -- hey aren't the same thing. I can say that my desk is 60" long and claim it's true to my measurement and accept that I'm leaving some precision out. That's not the same as saying Deity preferred that I do my work at a robust desk and thus I find myself in possession of one. The capital-T Truth is exactly where the latter thing fits, no matter its cultural utility, and it is not the same as the first thing.
the problem with Truth in stories, Bible included, is that after you excise all the obvious nonsense, bad memetics, prejudices, irrelevant cultural references, and glaringly unethical bits from the ancient story, the reminder is awkward gibberish.
I own one "Bible for Kids" bought for entertainment value. Its a mashup of the Old and The New Testament with all the cruel and obviously ghastly bits removed to make it kid friendly, or in fact, sanity-friendly. The outcome is a collection of plot holes and bizarre mental gymnastics. My favorite is their version of the Flood story: since the author did not want to admit that God used the flood for mass genocide, it to a unique story in which Noah gathered his family and the animals on the Ark so that god could essentially power-wash the planet without hurting anyone.
My idea is that labelling everything not strictly proven as "a steaming pile" is counter-artistic. Like it or not there's a special relationship between art and woo.
Not going to mince words, there's some unbelievably sloppy and lazy thinking in a lot of these comments about "asserting false things", "things contrary to science" and so on.
What do you actually mean by "the whole ridiculous backstory"? And what do others mean by "false things" and "the propositions of Christianity"? Some clarity and precision would be nice.
If you mean belief in God, well anyone who thinks "science" disproves God needs to go back to school and learn the difference between science and philosophy. This is a really embarassing thing to say. Scientists can of course argue against the existence of God but by doing so they are by definition not doing science.
If you mean belief in various miracles, that's far more relevant. But would then require an examination of which claimed miracles are actually essential to being a metaphysical Christian of some kind. I'd guess that the most easily refuted miracle claims are the least important for Christian belief, and the most important are the least easily refuted. Probably the only material miracle one need believe to be a Christian in the most basic sense is the resurrection of Christ. Perhaps an argument can be made that a single belief that a single person came back to life two thousand years ago is incompatible with a scientific worldview, but I'd like to see it actually made.
All this of course is not even mentioning the fact that being a "cultural Chistian" does not generally mean accepting any metaphysical claims at all, but other people have made that point.
The “backstory” I was alluding to is any of the supernatural stuff….or “miracles”, if you will. The stuff that requires belief without evidence ie faith. Resurrection would be one such example. Virgin birth is another.
I agree that science doesn’t “disprove” god….since you can’t “prove” the absence of something. My position there is that the hypothesis that “god exists” has not been proven, and thus I accept the null (ie that god doesn’t exist).
Like I said, I actually don’t object to some, perhaps even many, of the generic Christian teachings. I take them for what they are, which is some life lessons that in some cases have stood the test of time.
"Love thy neighbour" isn't particularly unique to Christianity, though. ("The Bible and the Quran teach us to love each other, but the Kama Sutra is more precise.")
AFAICT, the best thing Christianity did *as compared to what the alternative would have been" is the pretty strict prohibition on cousin marriage (for some time in the late 1st and early 2nd millennium extending as far as sixth cousins!), largely breeding clannish tendencies out of the northwestern European population.
That was one of the worst, as we're now seeing the descendants of that population suffering for their lack of clannish tendencies.
‘The first is boring: I hate asserting false things, even if they're "practical".’
This is *exactly* where I get stuck.
Except that Scott has previously espoused doing basically that if it’s helpful to address a mental illness (e.g. the hairdryer).
That's presumably why he says that's not the argument he's expecting other people to follow. He understands that it's a personal preference, and that some people may find utility in asserting falsehoods.
What's the "false thing" with the hairdryer?
If I remember correctly, Scott used to have a patient that suffered from anxiety, and she was particularly scared that she would leave her hair dryer on when she left to work. Scott's solution was to have her bring her hair dryer with her to work, and the issue was resolved.
Yes that’s the one
To nitpick a bit, he doesn't claim to have offered this solution, but to have endorsed someone else's suggestion of it.
I think it's fair though to draw a distinction between this and believing false things for their utility. It's an otherwise unnecessary behavior if not for one's own irrationality, but it's definitely not *false* to believe that if your hair dryer is in your car, you must not have left it on at home.
But it IS false to believe that your home is in danger of burning down because of a hairdryer you have already repeatedly confirmed is not on
Yes, but Scott doesn't endorse that believe. He just endorses dealing with that pre-existing belief pragmatically, if you can't change it.
That is perhaps false, but in an entirely different sense of the word, I think. The hair dryer is a magnet for free-radical anxiety; the true source of the anxiety might never be discovered; let the hairdryer become the totem to contain and vanquish the anxiety. Just like religion…
From a strictly scientific and empirical viewpoint, how do you know that a hairdryer you're not looking at is turned off? Only by induction, and induction can sometimes be wrong: I put a straw on a donkey's back so it can carry it, then another, and another...the donkey can carry any amount of straw.
Most people are comfortable with the idea of object permanence, and that if you check to be sure the hair dryer is off then it remains off. But can one definitively say it is FALSE that the hair dryer will burn down the house? Some unlikely ways it could be true: someone else turns the hair dryer on and leaves it, a power surge goes through the wiring and ignites it, the (admittedly tiny amounts of) radioactive materials in it happen to radiate in such a way as to concentrate gamma rays enough to cause ignition.
This seems like a question for philosophers.
He endorses that solution in the greater context of something he *absolutely* supports, and he also gave the example of treating Joshua Norton like the Emperor. Scott has no issue with supporting the belief of false things so long as those false things allow him to live more comfortably in the Bay Area.
That also doesn't strike me as an example of believing in false things. Joshua Norton may have been delusional, but that doesn't mean that any of the people humoring him actually believed he was in any practical sense the Emperor. Treating him like one was essentially a local cultural tradition which didn't entail any particular factual belief.
No, I know the incident, I just don't see how that solution requires believing anything false. "If my hairdryer is with me, it won't burn down the house" isn't false! And even if I believed in something false ("if my hairdryer is in the house, my house will burn down"), the solution itself doesn't require believing anything false.
The solution was to perform the rituals one would perform if she actually believed the false thing, even though rationally she didn’t. Which is what atheist cultural Christians do.
I think actual Christians would take a fairly dim view of that; you're only saved if you *believe* in Jesus, not just go through the motions, they're very clear about that.
To me the difference is that the "rituals" for the hairdryer don't involve affirming any particular belief about the hairdryer; whereas the "rituals" for Christianity involve affirming the beliefs of Christianity. Like saying prayers that explicitly state the teachings of Christianity.
And, probably most crucially, raising your children to be Christian, which presumably involves teaching them that Christianity is true.
In what way is this asserting a false thing? It’s a workaround, like using a paper clip when your fly zipper breaks. I guess if she started worrying about her stove, it might get complicated though.
Nothing simpler. Bring Your Stove To Work day!
First, here’s the post that mentions the hairdryer story:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/
Second, that’s not how I interpret the hair dryer incident. The question of honesty doesn’t come up there… nobody is tempted to lie. There’s just a Cheap Trick that clearly helps, even though you could argue it doesn’t treat the Root Cause.
Basically, he determined that it was better for his patient to carry on behaving as if she believed that she was in danger of burning her house down with a neglected hairdryer, because carrying the hairdryer to work was much less costly that attempting (and probably failing) to directly correct her OCD induced delusion.
It’s not a perfect match, in part because in the hairdryer case, the false belief had purely negative effects (but correcting it would have had higher costs).
Still, it seems to me to be a case where Scott acknowledged that maintaining false beliefs could indeed be practical, no scare quotes required. Therefore I found his dismissal here flippant (even though at the end of the day I agree with him that the version of cultural Christianity he argues against here is not a panacea).
I don't know if it matters, but Scott confirmed in the comments that the "hairdryer" was changed to protect patient anonymity, and it was actually something more likely to cause a fire, like a curling iron (he didn't say specifically what it was). So it might not have been a delusion per se that her risk was at a (very small) risk of burning down.
I don’t think that really matters. But I also didn’t think the point of an analogy was to nitpick the tiny ways it’s not a perfect one, yet here we are.
It's because you made a specific claim -- "Scott has previously espoused doing basically that [asserting false things] if it's helpful to address a mental illness", and your example of him doing this was the hair dryer story. It's not really nitpicking to point out that the hair dryer story does not involve or advocate the assertion of false things!
Anxiety is not a belief. That’s the problem with trying to draw an analogy here.
Tolerating the continued existence of a deeply-entrenched, otherwise-trivial false belief is very different from building a globally-relevant one from scratch.
The hairdryer is not "you should believe in false things because that belief brings non-epistemic benefits".
It is "it is sometimes ok to take illegible actions to prevent negative effects (such as anxiety) from false beliefs."
It seems obvious that not all our beliefs are well calibrated all the time. Some people will religiously disinfect their toilet seats, others will not bother. Clearly, at least one of these groups is objectively wrong in their risk assessment. As rationalists, they should investigate what the optimum sanitation level is, then take therapy until they are comfortable with it.
In actual fact, there are high opportunity costs to fixing your pre-existing beliefs, and it is likely you would spent more time in therapy learning that toilet seats are not as icky as you think than you would spend pointlessly disinfecting them in your life (if disinfection is uncalled for).
If Scott had said: "Everyone should try to believe that their hairdryer is likely to burn their house down, and take their dryers with them to prevent that from happening", that would be similar to him endorsing Christianity.
The point of this post by Scott is to argue against the proposition that atheists should be “cultural Christians” e.g. they should participate in Christian community rituals even though they don’t believe in God.
Or, rephrasing, “it is sometimes okay to take illegible actions (spending a couple hours a week in a church) to prevent negative effects (society collapsing to “modernism”)”
In both cases, one is being encouraged to “lean into” a false belief because it has a better outcome than fighting the false belief. I already acknowledged the difference between “direct positive effects of false belief” vs “avoiding negatives from false beliefs” in another comment.
That doesn't work so well for somebody like me. Last time I attended an after-church discussion group, I idly asked a guy sitting next to me some quick yes-or-no philosophical questions about the compatibility of his theological positions with certain capabilities of modern medicine, gave him a succinct and consistent but alarmingly-phrased answer when he asked what he'd just agreed to, and his resulting crisis of faith apparently resulted in the weekly meeting being permanently canceled, never to recur without stricter official supervision. Whole garden-path argument can't have been more than five minutes start to finish. Apparently, traditional social role I naturally slot into is "tempter demon."
Don't feel bad, tempter demons fill a vital niche in any theological ecosystem.
I think deliberately leading people to uncomfortable realizations about their beliefs when they have not consented to debating said beliefs would be a bit evil, but if it was either accidental or if the guy was actively entering the ring of debate it would be ok.
Me personally feeling, or being, bad isn't the issue I'm concerned with here. However vital such a role may be in theory, that particular "ring of debate" shattered the moment I touched it. Thus, either the system which produced it is not generally fit to build things which last, https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2009-04-09 or the way they sometimes manage requires sanitizing database inputs to exclude Bobby Tables, Susan Ignore-All-Previous-Instructions, siggorts, the no-eyed girl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbG2lbzaSdA and myself.
I think there is a vast gulf between
"a person affected by a false belief may take an illegible action to avoid bad consequences of having that belief, if losing their belief is not feasible"
and
"we should collectively take illegible actions associated with false beliefs".
You don't have to actually assert the propositions of Christianity.
If it helps pry you loose, most forms of Cultural Christianity do not require to you to recite the Nicene Creed. It is sufficient to conduct yourself as if the claims of Christianity were true, excepting perhaps "you need to go to church" and the like.
But more importantly, if you don't like asserting false things, where do you get the confidence that the things you assert to be true are true?
Seems to me that this whole "cultural Christianity" gambit only works in the long run if the new generation does it, and it's much harder to get them on board from a young age without asserting the actual doctrines of Christianity.
> if you don't like asserting false things, where do you get the confidence that the things you assert to be true are true?
I don't see how those two things are connected? I'm pretty confident that the sky is blue, but it's not because I enjoy telling people that the sky is green.
the problem is, if you strip Cultural Christianity of all the obvious nonsense and anti-ethics, the core that remains is basically "be a decent chap and don't hurt others".
Its not clear to me why we need to call it Cultural Christianity, and not just Cultural Common Sense + (occasionally) Santa Claus.
Thank you for bumping this discussion.
The standard response here is that what we see as "just be a good guy" is informed by Christian ethics and anthropology, and once you pull those away the justification for what seems to be common-sense good-guy behavior erodes. Then you counter with examples of civilizations that had the Golden Rule without Christian influence. We go back-and-forth on that until one of us loses interest. I believe this is Standard Internet Argument #74.
Instead I'm going to offer an argument grounded in The Nightmare Before Christmas. I read a fascinating Twitter thread about the enduring appeal of this 1993 film, which I can attest to as it is Halloween and I have been introducing my children to it. From the start I'll say that this can't explain all of the appeal, or even is a plurality explanation. But it's something. The basic argument is this:
Jack Skellington encounters Christmas Town, and is enchanted by all the trappings. He wants to celebrate it but he doesn't understand the "why" at the core of Christmas. There's a whole song devoted to how he tries to figure it out but he remains completely befuddled. And we shouldn't be surprised, because the trappings of Christmas - the trees, the lights, the food, Santa, winter, gifts, the secular music - don't tell us anything about the Incarnation of God in the form of Jesus Christ.
Interestingly, the film never resolves the "what is Christmas?" question. The only secular media ever to go all the way with that was Linus's little monologue in A Charlie Brown Christmas. But most other media fall back to a True Meaning of Christmas lesson that's vaguely about caring for other people and not being materialistic. TNBC doesn't do that. It could, it easily could. Instead it shifts to a message about cultural exchange and staying in your lane. It never actually provides an answer to Charlie Brown's question: "What is Christmas all about?" The argument is that TNBC resonates because secular celebrations of Christmas have the same crisis: asking the question of what's this all about, and the associated dissatisfaction of not getting an answer.
My extension of this argument is that the aspects of Christianity that we decide to retain once we've stripped out the parts that you don't like will intuitively seem hollow. You'll quickly have people asking "why Santa, though?" and there won't be a satisfactory answer. And I'm skeptical that we can maintain a civilization that doesn't understand anything at all about why it's doing what it does. Or, to make a more modest claim, if we're relying on cultural artifacts of Christianity (e.g., Santa) to keep civilization going, those artifacts don't have staying power without their core meaning, so we probably can't rely on them. If we're going to use cultural Christianity to stay afloat, it needs to be genuinely Christian at its core.
https://x.com/owenbroadcast/status/1851268303559303465
I don't believe in god, but I was raised Calvinist so it doesn't matter
The way I see it, the idea of hell is incompatible with an omnibenevolent god anyway.
I can't even accept it as practical, unless my goal is to manipulate others. Sometimes I've seen it work in that sense.
Wouldn’t Christianity be a victim of the pattern of secularism and degradation in society, not coming to this fate separately
Was there something about the original argument that tried to make a rational case for Christianity being a cultural tradition that is uniquely well-placed to prevent this kind of degeneration, rather than just the empirical case that Christian societies are the only societies that didn't? You seem to demolish the empirical case pretty soundly, but I didn't know if there was meant to be a rational case as well, or if they just picked Christianity at random out of the phone book, or just because it was the religion they happened to practice?
The original argument is that Christianity is what has led to the virtues modern liberals like (and, indeed, that it provides a reason for them that the liberals don't have anymore, so naturally the virtue wears out). This goes for non-Christian societies too-- they take ideas like the dignity of all men, loving your neighbor (if they do accept that), and science from Christianity.
I think there's an argument that goes: If you're not happy with the way things are in 2024, the only way out is back the way you came. There have been many forms of Christianity over 2,000 years, and you can stop at the form that suits you. But you've got to pick one of them.
> the only way out is back the way you came.
Actually, it's the opposite. As they say, "Time's arrow neither stands still nor reverses. It merely marches forward."
Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.
I would want to see that case made, that liberalism as a value system can’t support itself without Christianity, or that Christianity is more supportive of it than, say, Buddhism or Norse paganism or whatever.
Norse paganism (in so far as we know it) was NOT supportive of liberal values. Of course, most of what we know either came from viking invader or stories curated by Christian monks. Many other polytheistic traditions, however, would be so supportive. (At least with a bit of careful selection.)
OTOH, it's worth remembering that we never know what the "folk traditions" were of things long ago. Usually we know at most what stories the aristocrats liked.
I agree that the descriptions we have of 10th century Norse paganism are not supportive of liberal values!
But it's also true that the descriptions we have of 10th century Christianity are not particularly supportive of liberal values either.
It's reasonable to say that Christianity is a big tent, and that some forms are favorable and others are not - but once you recognize that complexity, it should be clear that you would need to do a *lot* of work to differentiate the forms of Christianity that are from the ones that aren't, and *also* do a *lot* of work to figure out if there are relevant variations of non-Christian religions that might be even better.
My guess is that just as various other pagan religions have had times and places that seemed more or less supportive of liberal values, there would be times and places where Norse paganism would have been as well, had there been a larger population practicing it over a wider variety of places and economic circumstances. There's not obviously anything intrinsic to Christianity that makes it better suited to this.
The Norse pagans were prodigious slavers. It was their meat and potatoes. Their major form of income. Their raison d’etre. The Normans - the descendants of Vikings who converted to Christianity were strongly anti slavery. Some of this is changing economic systems and settling down - but a lot of it was Christianity.
Normans still remained the best warriors of Christ for a few centuries. They kept the positives of both traditions ;)
Are you implying that the antebellum South was not Christian?
Contemporary Christianity wasn't exactly supportive of liberal values either. It's almost like liberal values are an emergent property of increased technological and economic development, rather than a consequence of which old stories people happened to favor at the time.
it was far more complex that that. Norse culture was astonishingly liberal in some aspects (like say, divorce) and extremely conservative in others (like for example, nudity). Case in point, under their law a woman could divorce her husband for the immoral crime of walking shirtless in public.
Being homosexual was not illegal in the Norse culture, (though being a "bottom" was shamed). However, calling a man a gay slur was dueling offense, a an easy way to die.
Gender-fluidity was extremely frowned upon, and considered a sign of witchcraft. However, full and total gender-switching was acceptable (see: the graves of shield-maidens who were biologically female but geared up as 100% male) and even enshrined in their myths (See; Brunhildr).
Even economically, the Norse ideal of noble largesse worked as both a form of local Socialism and like Libertarian Trickle Down in small scale at the same time.
The ideas of liberalism and conservatism they had do not map onto ours at all.
I think Galileo would love to hear how the idea of science came from Christianity.
I guess a comprehensive treatment of this thesis is the book Dominion by Tom Holland (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_(Holland_book))
A pretty compelling description of the ways the teachings of Jesus transformed how people think and laid the foundations for much of what modern humans hold dear, including both wokeness and secularism.
Reasoning from limited evidence, a single example. If the Industrial and subsequent Technological revolutions had occurred during the heyday of liberal Islam (Moorish Spain perhaps) this article would be arguing for Cultural Islam. Or any number of other, relatively (remember Christianity became much more liberal as part of the revolutions, it was not that way to begin with) liberal cultures through history.
you mean against :)
The connections between Christianity and such things as the rise of science and of limited government is not accidental, many people have argued.
Institutional Christianity fought tooth and nail against both for 100s of years and now wants to claim the credit for them
The Draper-White "warfare of religion against science" thesis has no intellectually serious defenders.
That you've read.
Please give some recommendations then. I hopped off this train back in the early-2010s around the decline of the new atheist movement so I'm unfamiliar with any new developments. Re-learning about the history of science and Catholicism was one of the important in-roads that brought me back to the church.
Any historian of science, historian of Christianity, or historian of medieval or early modern Europe would tell you the same thing.
As opposed to the books you haven’t read on everything to do with the subject.
I would expect may people to argue that whether it were true or not.
I accept that many people have argued that. I've even read a few. Generally they prove their assumptions by their conclusions. And they often get history wrong.
It's probably not a random coincidence that the industrial revolution didn't occur under any variety of Islam.
There are _many_ circumstances and environments under which the industrial revolution didn't start, because it only started in a single country at a single time. From that argument alone, you can't assign an outsized causality to Christianity.
I'd bet against you on this one. Far am I from being a historian but it seems to me like plenty of progress was made during the golden age of islam. That's why we use arabic numerals and algebra's called what it is, eh? If islamic countries had a period like that around the 18th century instead of the 10th or whatever, that'd seem like as good a place as any for it to start
That's not a bad argument per se, but the weakness in it is that the industrial revolution really could have started way earlier. The Romans were right about there in the time of Christ, as were the Chinese. Both had huge empires, one of which encompassed where the revolution actually took off 1600 years later. The Islamic world's golden age could well have produced it, but instead degenerated into the sort of top down slave society we worry about today. Almost anywhere in the western Christian world could have produced it too, but also failed.
I tend to think that Christianity is less of a requirement as a result, possibly necessary but certainly not sufficient. Certainly not Catholic Christianity or probably even 'normal' Protestant... people often forget that by the time of the industrial revolution the Church of England had been rocking its own thing for quite some time!
No, the Romans were never close to an industrial revolution.
https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/
You aren't exactly wrong, but you are addressing the wrong aspect. We are talking the cultural/religious angle, with which ACOUP agrees: Rome didn't have the economic culture to launch the IR, as evidenced by the fact they didn't, or even get anything very close.
On the tech side... I think ACOUP is rather wrong. Primarily about the importance of coal. He does note that coal was used for fuel, but makes the common historian mistake of claiming that it was necessary for production and only started being used because people ran out of wood. (See this good explanation of the economics here: https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-the-coal-conquest ). Wood is inefficient, but it is farmable and had been for quite sometime.
ACOUP also focuses on the weaving industry a bit too much I think. While it was important in the Industrial Revolution we had, I don't know that it is the ONLY thing that could be important in starting an industrial revolution. I suspect many industrial clusters could spur the take off between use of mechanical procedures, specialization of roles, division of labor, and mass market trading, and cloth production just happened to be the one we got.
It is fair to say that Rome was not a few years aware from an IR but rather a couple centuries, but that is still a big deal; moving the IR 1000 years earlier is massive. The important question isn't exactly "how many 10's of years away were they?" because that isn't exactly clear, but rather why didn't they make the next few steps given they were within range. Because again, unless one hard assumes that it the IR MUST come from weaving and coal on rivers (and lots of places have coal and rivers) then the answer for why some places had an IR and others didn't seems to be either dumb luck or culture.
Likewise that mode of questioning is what is needed to think about things like "Why, when technology is seemingly very easily spreadable, are some countries rich while others poor? Indeed, why are some PARTS of one country poor while others are rich?"
> It is fair to say that Rome was not a few years aware from an IR but rather a couple centuries, but that is still a big deal; moving the IR 1000 years earlier is massive.
That isn't accurate either though! Even if you ignore everything else, they also lacked the advanced cannon technology that enabled the construction of primitive steam engines. It was only due to the arrival of gunpowder from China, followed by centuries of constant warfare in Europe spurring an existential arms race that led metallurgy to get to the point where the IR was even possible.
Islamic Golden Age ended when the Mongols literally and figuratively trampled their scientific brains under the hooves of their steppe ponies. The fall of Baghdad pretty much meant that the following Islamic culture was a Post-Apocalyptic one.
Europe and Christianity would look about the same if the Mongols decided to not stop at Legnica but push for Rome, pummel it to custard, and then strip land tot he bedrock on their way back home.
And algorithms.
They're *called* Arabic numerals, but they actually come from India. And a lot of the Arabic knowledge of "the golden age" was imported from Egypt.
It's really hard (effectively impossible) to trace the flows of knowledge in the distant past. Most of the records have been lost. But there's significant evidence that there were flows along the silk routes (there wasn't just one). Certainly Alexander did a lot to increase the flow during his lifetime. (I have a friend who believes that Aristotle's mother came from India. I don't find the evidence convincing, but he could be right.)
We use Arabic numerals because they are more useful, and the term Algebra is borrowed from Arabic, but like alcohol, isn’t unique to Arabia. Also the areas invaded by Islam were the richest parts of the Roman Empire in the east and North Africa. Islam didn’t add much that wasn’t already there and the golden age was pretty relative.
"Arabic" numerals aren't actually Arab at all, they're from India. The most prestigious scientists of the golden age of Islam generally weren't Arabs either, but other ethnicities like Persians who had been conquered by Muslims. And scientific progress ground to a halt after such conquests, even if not immediately.
As Adrian has stated, the industrial revolution only happened once independently. The problem is that the inventions have to happen on the pathway of economic viability: the real world is not like Civilization, where a state simply decides that now would be a good time to research steam engines and allocates their research budget to them for a few years. Instead, you require coal mines which have to be pumped dry, because the first steam engines are kinda shitty and not worthwhile to run unless you can use coal for free. You need to have perfected casting cannon barrels so you have the tech to make cylinders. You need mechanized looms so that you have a viable consumer of mechanical power who can pay the bills until you eventually invent the railway.
Of course, you also have a lot of social requirements. If slave labor to pump out your mines in cheap enough, none of the elites will ever try to find a better way to do things. You need a certain class capable of working of inventors, if making an atmospheric engine gets you kicked out of the blacksmith's guild, that would be bad. You also need some class for whom it is acceptable to make money through selling machines.
I can hear you saying "well, Newton happened before the steam engine started paying any bills". This is correct: there was certainly a period of interest in science before the industrial revolution happened, and it could be argued that this was yet another prerequisite.
I am however doubtful that this was a direct consequence of Christianity. Yes, Mendel, the first to figure out how genetics work was a Catholic abbot. But if Christianity is uniquely suited for scientific discovery, why did it take them some 1850 years to make that discovery? Granted, you first need to figure out how pollination works, but that is something which you could discover with a few glass boxes and scientific curiosity.
I am very skeptical about the very hard line of economic viability of inventions you mention. I suspect many different paths of mechanization of industry exist, we just happened to get the coal-weaving path so availability bias suggests it has to be that one. There are probably dozens of other options that would have suited as well, but we just didn't get them first.
From https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/
> It is not clear to me that there is a plausible and equally viable alternative path from an organic economy to an industrial one that doesn’t initially use coal (much easier to gather in large quantities and process for use than other fossil fuels) and which does not gain traction by transforming textile production (which, as we’ve discussed, was a huge portion of non-agricultural production in organic economies), though equally I cannot rule such alternatives out.
Personally, I think that the coal mines which needed to be pumped out were the bottleneck. If you run atmospheric engines for your coal mines long enough, someone is going to discover a better steam engine which will become good enough to pump out water in your other mines. The spinning jennies just waiting for something to provide torque were certainly speeding development along, but even without them we would have likely gotten the first railway by now.
Yea I know he says that. It is possible he is not conversant on all the different methods and use of fossil fuels, or even various organic fuel sources (such as clean burning whale oil, or just charcoal.) He says he can't rule them out himself.
And again, even if we grant that the coal -> steam engine -> weaving path is the necessary one, it isn't as though coal is uncommon, weaving is uncommon or the need to pump out water is that uncommon. Pumps existed, pretty much everyone weaves things, coal is all over. Britain does have the benefit of having a lot of rivers and everywhere being pretty close to the ocean, so there is that; it makes coal much easier to transport, something like 10x easier. Rivers are not terribly uncommon, however.
Was there anyplace else that had coal and iron ore so close to each other?
Also, there are a lot of varieties of Christianity. It's possible that only one of them was special.
An alt-history Islamic Industrial Revolution might have been based on oil.
China seems to have a lot of coal and iron at hand, and even in Britain wood was heavily used for a long time to produce a whole lot of iron. See https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-the-coal-conquest
IFIAK China was too rich and had a reach long enough that they never ran into the problem that spurred the necessity of the industrial revolution in britain:
The security of the state depended on a supply of hardwood trees of sufficient size and age to build ships and to run industry, AND the supply of such trees was completely tapped out where they could be easily acceed, AND there was easily accessible coal that needed large scale pumping to access, AND industrial supplies of suitable metal were plentiful enough to not make it cheaper to just use eg. slaves.
The best argument I've heard, from Deirdre McCloskey, is that it was specifically protestant Christianity where the industrial revolution flourished because it allowed more space for individual conscience and agency than Catholicism.
Or perhaps it's the flavor of Christianity where most people are doomed to hell, but God will save the elect. And you can tell that you're of the elect because you can make a lot of money.
It is not entirely incorrect to be suspect of proposals to "Retvrn", because indeed, the past became the present (and one cannot cut-and-paste the past to the present, regardless). However, it is also not correct to assume that the same faults are predetermined to recur; one would not necessarily expect 17th century Christianity, returned in spirit and practice to the Apostolic Era, to recapitulate Donatism, or many of the other heresies defeated in the intervening years.
A return in the sense of rewinding entails memory ablation; a return in the sense of reiteration is an opportunity to learn from mistakes.
But if we're counting on being able to learn from mistakes and not repeat the previous course of progression, we're probably best off going to something actually good in its own right, rather than something that progressed to what we like last time.
On the one hand, I expect we have different identifications of that which is good in its own right. Bracketing that, however, that something is not a priori perfect does not seem to be reason to discount it entirely, especially with complex systems. This very quickly becomes a Bayesian problem, no? Allocating proportionate commitment to refinement and iteration in accordance with perceived learning capacity, distance to goal, and clarity of target.
Alternatively, all we'd have to do is clean up and bandage the festering wound, and not deliberately cut ourselves with dirty knives again.
I don't think there's been a good case made that the decline of Christianity was an inevitable result of the conditions that we like (democracy, freedom of speech, science, etc.). It seems plausible that instead of going "none of this can be tolerated, get back to your farms, peasant" or "nothing is forbidden, everything is permissible", we could try navigating some sort of middle path, where we introspect on what exactly went wrong, and where, and try keeping as much of the conditions that we like as possible.
> I don't think there's been a good case made that the decline of Christianity was an inevitable result of the conditions that we like (democracy, freedom of speech, science, etc.).
I think that such a case can be made.
On the one hand, science is forever encroaching into the territory of religion. Before science, you had "God created Earth and Man, an placed the Earth at the center of the universe". God (or Satan) is basically the answer for any question where you don't have a good answer. What makes the plants grow? God. Why do the planets move like they do? God wills it.
Once you get science God will lose responsibility for a lot of things which matter to humans. You can still blame him for the Big Bang, but that will only get you as far as Deism. Or you could claim that he interacts with the world, but only in deniable ways.
Regarding freedom of speech, I think that religious uniformity is much easier to achieve when you can burn the heretic on the stake. A few key branches of Christianity evolved as state religions for millennia. Expecting them to do well in a free marketplace of ideas competition is like expecting Khrushchev to win a fair democratic election. In fact, it is amazing that Christianity does as well as it does.
I've been wondering what it would be like to see a rainbow and have no idea what caused it.
Not at all, you are viewing Christianity through the Augustine lens. Eastern Christianity holds God to be unknowable and incomprehensible hence scientific discoveries are irrelevant to the religion, they are simply human labels and descriptions of things God put in place. To "discover" more of God's creation isn't anything novel, discovering string theory or quantum entanglement is of no more religious value that opening your eyes in the morning and discovering its raining today or your alarm clock didn't go off. If anything science enhances one's wonder of God's creation including the intricacies of the minutiae. Why God created a multiverse or seen the value of having quarks be in two places at once we will never understand but we can appreciate the revealed beauty of it.
That's all cope. Christian intellectuals *used* to think that it was important in understanding the world. It's only once science solved all the mysteries that religion had to stop making falsifiable claims about the world and retreat into the vague wishy-washy stuff we have today.
You are confusing Protestantism with Christianity. Catholicism, in both it's eastern and western forms, has always been pro science when it wasn't be framed by it's adherents (the scientist) as hearsay to disprove God. I will concede certain institutions or individuals were against science occasionally but that was never doctrinal, i.e. just become some Roman Bishop was upset once about gravity doesn't mean anyone else was nor did a new verse in the Bible appear that said "gravity doesn't exist". Now sure it COULD have happened but it didn't; there wasn't a single Euncamical council, the sort of thing that would be required to make your claims a reality, that said "science is bad".
And no Christianity has never retreated into some vague wish-washy stuff we have today, you are once again confusing Protestantism with Christianity. Nor for that matter has scienced solved any mystery of religious import hence like I said, it's irrelevant to Christianity outside increasing our appreciation and marvel of God's revelated truth. And no this isn't a "modern thing", you can go back early Christian theologians, the "fathers" of the church, and they will agree. God and all his creation is something to wonder at, there is nothing that can be discovered which can impugn on that. Maybe go to church sometime and quit being so angry.
Fair enough.
My actual position is something along the lines of: science and liberalism and democracy and capitalism all relied on key assumptions that were developed and maintained by Christianity, and so we never needed to develop independent justification for them. As Christianity faded, those assumptions were no longer universally shared, thus undermining science and liberalism and democracy and capitalism, which had never had to stand on their own. And the goal I hope for is to find a new foundation for those assumptions; I'd prefer something independent, but frankly I'm starting to think full-on Christianity is better than the current situation.
The assumptions are, roughly, from off the top of my head: That all humans (perhaps broadly defined) are at some fundamental level equal, and deserving of equal rights, and responsible for equal duties. And that the individual human is the only thing that can be considered to have moral agency and moral standing. That humans are responsible for their own actions. That human rights include things like life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, and that human duties include things like behaving ethically.
And on the one hand, all of this seems basic, but on the other, I don't think any of it is provably true, and I think some might be provably false. And I think we're seeing what happens when these assumptions are questioned, and it's not good.
To expand on what quiet_NaN said, it goes back to Scotts other objection that affirming a falsehood is bad. And unlike what he wrote in this post I don't think that can be waved off as mere aesthetics. Falsehoods and good epistemics are innately hostile to each other. Scott actually wrote about this already in the Parable of Lightning:
"[T]he biggest threat is to epistemology. The idea that everything in the world fits together, that all knowledge is worth having and should be pursued to the bitter end, that if you tell one lie the truth is forever after your enemy – all of this is incompatible with even as stupid a mistruth as switching around thunder and lightning. People trying to make sense of the world will smash their head against the glaring inconsistency...
"The Church didn’t lift a finger against science. It just accidentally created a honeytrap that attracted and destroyed scientifically curious people. And any insistence on a false idea, no matter how harmless and well-intentioned, risks doing the same."
I agree that people shouldn't spread falsehoods. But, and I'm probably not going to put this very well... I'm not sure that this thing we agree would have been developed without building on the evolution of this particular religion, and I'm not sure that it can maintain itself without that foundation. I worry that it's like an early attempt at heavier-than-air flight, where we launch upwards as if from a ski jump, and have been moving upwards without contact with the ground, but now we're in the process of discovering that flapping our arms isn't enough to remain aloft.
In my view it arose much less as an evolution of the positive aspects, than as a reaction against its excesses and failures, especially as expressed in the wars of religion around the Reformation. For most of its existence, Christianity was deeply hostile to liberal values, and while it wears a relatively more gentle face now that's mostly by necessity. We shouldn't be too quick to forget the much more vicious aspects it wore 500 or 1000 years ago, or assume they won't return if given the chance.
Of course the same faults are not predestined to occur, since they did not occur to all Christian sects. Evangelicals, Pentecostals, conservative Catholics and Orthodox, they didn’t modernize and didn’t become woke. They chose a different path: which is why they’re still going strong, while the modernizing mainline churches have been hollowed out.
Nope, judging by declining fertility they're just on a lag. Even Mormons aren't insular enough.
Not according to the National Survey for Family Growth: American who attend church weekly are above replacement fertility, and have been for the last four decades. Fertility has dropped for those who attend less than weekly (more "nominal" Christians) and the non-religious fertility rate has stayed consistently below replacement rate for the same period of time.
https://www.christianitytoday.com/2022/08/birth-rates-church-attendance-decline-fertility-crisis/
It seems like religiosity or at least church attendance is declining across the board. https://news.gallup.com/poll/642548/church-attendance-declined-religious-groups.aspx
That stat is looking at "Protestants" as a whole: which combines Evangelicals, Fundamentalist, and Pentecostals (the non-modernizing Christians) with Mainline churches like Lutherans, Presbyterians, Anglicans, etc who modernized and have mostly turned woke.
If you seperate them out, you can see that the majority of the decline in religiosity has come from those modernized mainline churches, and not the conservative Christian ones.
This article brings some more context and nuance to the decline (https://www.christianitytoday.com/2021/07/mainline-protestant-evangelical-decline-survey-us-nones/)
"if everyone who was raised evangelical stayed in that tradition, how large would it be? In 1973, about 20 percent of Americans were currently evangelicals, while another 4 percent were former evangelicals. In 2018, those numbers aren’t that much different: 22 percent are currently evangelicals, while another 4 percent were former evangelicals. In essence, defection was basically the same.
"For mainliners in 1973, 28 percent were current adherents while another 7 percent had left the tradition. In 2018, only 11 percent were currently mainline Protestants but another 6 percent had grown up mainline and left. In the most recent data, for every two mainline Protestants, there was another that had left."
They're not "going strong", they lost control. If they had actual control, they would have never let any of this happen. Is Native American culture "going strong" as well, or is it an irrelevant, powerless culture that is doomed to die?
They've only lost control in Western European counties, and are currently in a culture war over America. There are always civilizational ups and downs: after the Muslim conquests, the only Christian countries left were the ignorant backwaters of Western Europe, with all the great centers of Christendom lost. Yet, if you had said that the Muslims had won and the Christians were on their way out, you would have been dead wrong. The situation is not yet so bad as it was back then.
Oh of course, Christianity still has a chance. But they still aren't winning yet. They still need to take power. Nothing less than absolute control will be enough.
In America: globally Christianity is still top dog when it comes to religion, and all signs point to it keeping that position (though those Muslims are at it again and doing their best to catch up).
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/04/02/religious-projections-2010-2050/
They've lost the culture war over America.
I wouldn't declare a war lost when they're still on equal footing as their enemy. Hell, I'd say the true war hasn't even started yet.
They've been losing ground ever since the phrase "culture war" got brought up, and show no indication of any way to reverse that.
There is no enemy to fight though. Christianity is not losing its faithful to another religion, but to uninterested agnosticism.
A religion can only survive if it can attract followers and punish apostates. Modern Christianity has little way of doing the former, and cannot legally do the latter.
One of the ways modern culture is obviously maladaptive is below-replacement fertility. Ancients were aware of falling fertility being a problem, and we've preserved quotes from them about it https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/ancient-fertility-quotes but that didn't prevent modern culture from following that path. People have written about the declines of past civilizations from Ibn Khaldun to Edward Gibbon, Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, Glubb Pasha, Joseph Tainter, Jared Diamond etc. This hasn't been enough to get people to take the long view https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/long-views-are-cominghtml Mere memory, or some people having awareness, isn't enough. You need some way to lock in adaptations that won't succumb to cultural drift or "rot". https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/what-makes-stuff-rothtml
Modern rates of unintended pregnancies in the US are ~40%; given the historical absence of prophylactics and abortifacients, I would wager that the majority of humans ever born were not resultant from the desire of parents to maximize the average happiness of their offspring. This is perhaps the paradigmatic example of a super-organism becoming too cerebral, faster than it can adapt other aspects of its character.
I would be very interested to see the weight of variance of teenage pregnancy on life outcomes, controlled for SES. Many aspects are actually strongly hereditary, articulated through seemingly non-hereditary factors; for example, Iceland does not have anywhere near the social dysfunction one would expect with a 2/3 out-of-wedlock birth incidence.
Also, happiness is overweighted, if not outright overrated, as a metric, both descriptively and prescriptively.
But we can always just ban contraception and abortion. And what better way of enforcing it than through religious dogma?
for first pregnancies it's more like 2/3 IIRC
Genetic continuity persists by co-opting the pursuit of proxy goals.
Going extinct is obviously maladaptive. If the future consists only of insular cultures which avoid influence from below-replacement cultures (perhaps think of their cultural memes as analogous to pathogens that other cultures protect themselves from), then that's failing to influence the future.
No, but secular people are headed in that direction. Despite an expected gain of 61 million people from religious deconversion, the global percentage of "religiously unaffiliated" people (agnostics, atheists, seculars, etc) is expected to decline from 16.4% of the global population in 2010 to 13.2% in 2050. Unless their fertility rates turn around, there's no reason to expect that trend to change.
"an expected gain of 61 million people" -- globally, by 2100? what is the source of that particular estimate? Curious what the logic is for such a low total looking ahead that far. Unless maybe it's using a really-strict definition of deconversion.
it's possible that a downwards trend to fertility won't continue to extinction, but rather until a new equilibrium, just as predictions of catastrophic population increase 50, 30 years ago failed to come to pass. 1st, 2nd, nth derivatives of population graphs don't necessarily stay constant
this, exactly.
Yes, if insular cultures like the Amish & ultra-Orthodox retain their separate norms, then they can survive even if other cultures go extinct.
Optimizing for "happiness" is maladaptive.
How much influence is South Korea going to have when it's a bunch of old people on pensions and a tiny core of overburdened young trying to pay for those pensions? Demographic bulges are fun until they turn upside down.
You can't convert most people in the world because most of the world is low IQ. The high IQ areas are all low fertility.
I don't think low fertility (within reason) is maladaptive at all. I think the world is massively overpopulated, I'd like to see a world in which there were closer to 1 billion or 2 billion people (partly for reasons of sustainability, and mostly to allow all the other species with which we are meant to share the planet to recover their populations), and sub replacement fertility is the only reasonable path to achieve that.
African fertility rates today are the problem, not the solution (though they are making progress too, albeit more slowly than people hoped).
> partly for reasons of sustainability
Overt downwing death cultism - thank you for being straightforward in your thanatomania.
Ask rather what is the population necessary to generate a spacefaring, asteroid mining, orbital manufacturing civilization?
I do not deny world-historic efforts will be necessary, but certainly "try something new" is also of this caliber.
I don't know if I will fully agree with this. First off, the Ayaan Hirsi Alis of this world are not canvassing for Christianity in a vacuum. I'm pretty sure if the only two options were sober liberal atheism and Christianity, most of these intellectuals would and have adopted the former.
No, they are canvassing for Christianity as against Islam which courtesy of demographic change is now a substantial presence in the West. They recognize quite acutely the incompatibility of Islam with western civilization ( it is not too much of an exaggeration to say the latter begins where the former terminates) and want to avert this.
It's a Pascal's wager for the modern era but the prize is the preservation of the west rather than paradise. As with the other Pascal's wager, the implication that people can affect belief is crucial( this is what I consider unlikely).
Second, wokism is really Christianity without the aesthetic and artistic beauty and also without the concept of forgiveness( this is important because there is no one to do the forgiving as there is no God). But all the other elements are there: the concept of original sin, the obsession with the fundamental nature of reality, the morality of guilt, the emphasis on atonement, even its markedly socialist strain, et cetera. Wokism is a distinctly western phenomenon. It will not and cannot arise elsewhere. So to some degree, the pragmatic argument for Christianity bites the dust. It is Christianity, albeit shorn of its better elements, that has gotten the West to this point. What they mistake for the cure actually is responsible for the ailment.
They *say* they want racial divides to fade away. But any time anyone makes actual progress on that, they start stirring up more hatred and division. This is the Shirky Principle in action: people who build their self-image and their livelihood around fighting racism literally cannot afford to get rid of racism.
> I’m sure that is true of some people, but a lot of people are also quite sincere about it.
Yes. Lenin called them "useful idiots." They're the ones who take pretty words at face value rather than looking at outcomes, who never internalized the meaning of the crucially important phrase we were all taught as children, "actions speak louder than words."
> Notice how wokism seemed to gain power dramatically after Trump came on the scene.
I didn't really notice that at all. Resurgent conservatism ("Trumpism") was a backlash against the relentless growth of wokism, slowly creeping and engulfing more and more of the public sphere for decades and then becoming a massive all-encompassing totalitarian blob ever since about 2000. It got *louder* after conservatives started to push back once Trump came on the scene, but it's been noticeably losing a lot of power ever since. For example, could you have even imagined 10 years ago that major corporations would be voluntarily shuttering their Diversity And Equity programs, just for starters?
Thank you for your reply. First, the analogy between Japan and the West lacks weight. Wokeness is more than collective guilt. I listed a set of other features and brevity did not permit mentioning others. Islam and Christianity both have many similarities( monotheisms for one with similar mythologies) and nobody would say they are anywhere close to being identical. Wokeness is a distinctly western phenomenon.
Second, it clearly lacks aesthetic and artistic value. Captain Planet and Power Rangers are not what anyone will consider great works of art or television. Furthermore, Captain Planet debuted in 1990 and Power Rangers in 1993, a full seven years before the new millennium. Most people will agree wokeness is a 21st century ideology. I cannot name five works of art which clearly embody woke ideals and are of significant aesthetic value. I don't think this is a coincidence either. Good art can be ideological but it cannot exist for the sake of ideology. That's just propaganda. Given that wokeness runs so counter to the belief systems of so many, it is likely to be unsuccessful propaganda.
Third, wokeness has no concept of forgiveness because it has no concept of a God. It shares this with other quasi religious belief systems like communism. Where communism emphasizes class and fascism emphasizes ethnicity/nationality, wokeness emphasizes race and sexuality( the others as well but not as muted; this is partly why it has been so convenient for the upper class who have adopted it enthusiastically as race and sexuality do not threaten economic interests).
In all cases, there is a simplified oppressed/oppressor dichotomy used to explain all forms of socioeconomic relations. The oppressor can either be eliminated or he can be reformed. But he cannot be forgiven largely because he is guilty of something which he cannot change ( race, ethnicity, class, etc) and will always be guilty of. That is why ideologies like these often end up supporting or instigating genocide because it is the logical conclusion of such a mindset.
If people want to see racial prejudices disappear, and I argue they never will because racists on all sides will always exist as it's fundamental human nature, the best approach is to return to what we had in the nineties where there was a genuine attempt to construct a post racial society. Prejudice will always be with us but it doesn't mean progress cannot be made. Wokeness has not offered that progress as it's fundamentally uninterested in that anyway. It has only exacerbated political, ethnic, and racial division. Perhaps, with people tiring of it, we can begin to afford better solutions.
I think we have fundamental agreement on going back to the culture and zeitgeist of the 90s - 2000s, ( although I don't think this will happen). I also think you have a good natured approach towards wokeness which I will concede certainly exists in certain quarters.
Our disagreements pertain to all the other points but I suppose those have been made quite clear by now.
One final assertion though: although race isn't fundamental to human nature, racism is. By which I mean it's not so much that race is an important classifier of human beings( although since David Reich's landmark work on human genetics and anthropology, I've been less inclined to call it arbitrary), but more so that people will consciously try to divide and organize themselves across certain characteristics. Discrimination is intrinsic to human experience. Since the concept of race, especially through the filter of skin colour is so salient, it's an obvious category for this. This is what I mean when I say it will never go away.
It seems to me Wokeness replaces the concept of forgiveness with the concept of tribalism, which is a regression in societal philosophy. "My tribe comes first, especially compared to a tribe that wronged us in the past". Christianity was always supposed to be about crossing tribal lines, from Jesus talking to the Samaritan woman at the well to Peter getting the vision prompting him to take the gospel to the uncircumsized. The veneer of original sin and such is new, but without Christianity you would still have tribalism, there would just be under a different skin.
But there are still tribes, with very deliberate efforts to keep them divided.
I disagree on Japan. Its Western equivalent, Germany, has been considerably better at feeling guilty, to the extent that its relations with Poland and Israel and so on are now very good, whereas Japan still has problems with South Korea over this issue. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_war_apology_statements_issued_by_Japan#Controversy
I agree (with your disagreement).
This says more about the forgiveness of the Polish people compared to Korea, which is absolutely impossible to please on this matter.
You can't count the number of apologies in the history section -- I gave up counting by the mid 90s, when the apology rate reaches three per year, but the number of apologies addressed at Korea directly is easily double digits -- and then consider that by 2010 a quarter of Koreans believed Japan *never apologised*!
Can you point to where they've done so on record? My understanding is that Japan has refused to admit the abuses visited on Korea specifically, while Germany has denied nothing.
The rapid and overt forgiveness of the Polish people was a way to avoid a conversation about their own manifested expression of their lives of Jews and Ukrainians during the 1940s, i.e. "move in here, nothing to see, we forgive the Germans and Russians"
I've also read that WW2 history is still highly revisionist in Japan.
> people in Japan feel guilt over imperialism and World War II way more than people in the West feel about anything the West ever did
Do they really? Can you imagine any german chancellor denying the nazi crimes the way Shinzo Abe denied the Nanking massacre or forced sexual slavery?
Your second bit was going to be my comment if no one else said it. The core of wokeness is obsession with and elevation of victimhood. That only happened because of Western Christianity. Arguing for Christianity as a bulwark against the kind of society that produces wokeness gets the problem backwards.
Jesus was not a victim. He chose to die for our sins because he loved us so much.
Christ was not a victim in the contemporary sense of a person who gets hurt on account of their powerlessness, but absolutely a victim in the sense of the Latin *victima*, a living sacrificial offering. In Catholic liturgy Christ is repeatedly described this way, indeed as a "holy, pure and immaculate victim".
Wokeness and Christianity both elevate victimhood, but in very very different ways, and those ways are the bulwark.
Wokeness treats victimhood as a Marxist class, and uses it as part of a historical struggle of the righteous against the oppressors. It's a fundamentally collectivist notion, that justifies and excuses cruelty by the victim.
Christianity treats suffering as a component of personal virtue. I'm not an expert, but I think it has something to do with relieving others' suffering by taking it onto yourself. It's a fundamentally individual notion, that encourages forgiveness of others and a strict accounting for ones' own actions.
I agree with forgiveness of others but my interpretation of Christianity is that it also encourages you to forgive yourself (Jesus forgives you - he has already paid for your sins)
The experience of pain can be transformed into joy when we reflect that it brings us closer to Christ the redeemer who experienced so much pain on the cross
> my interpretation of Christianity is that it also encourages you to forgive yourself
I kinda agree, but I personally wouldn't have put it like that because of local issues. In America we sometimes run into some evangelical or fundamentalist Calvinist types, and their unknowing spiritual descendants in secular therapy, who IMHO take this too far, and use it as a solipsistic excuse to get away with all sorts of stuff. But that's more of a personal annoyance that I haven't gotten past (yet, I hope).
Yeah, not everyone who claims to follow Jesus embodies His teachings
What is it about Eastern Christianity that insulates it from wokeness? I have some speculation but I would be interested in hearing your thoughts.
If anything, I would say that wokeness is Calvinist. Calvinism, of course, is form of Western Christianity, but it's not all of Western Christianity, or even close to a plurality of it
Search for my earlier comment above.
(https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/against-the-cultural-christianity?utm_source=direct&r=1lcf5a&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=71380031)
Basically though it's the fact it's non-Roman (legalese) but Hellenistic (mystery). The true religion of the West is process and Augustine married western Christianity to it until death of western Christianity will it part.
That's something for to think about, thanks. But you keep saying Augustine. Don't you mean Aquinas? Orthodoxy leans on Augustine a lot. Like whoa.
I'm not going to lie, I get all those old Roman A's mixed up. It's the one that basically argued God is a lawyer which became the bedrock of the Western Church. It wasn't Aquinas as he was after the split though he did cement it.
Any conversation about the history of concepts around "victimhood" must include the history of "rights". As far as a brief search reveals, J.S. mill proclaimed a skeptic's stance.
Reminds me of what Hitchens said about Mother Theresa: “She doesn’t love the poor, she loves poverty.
Hi RI!
Thanks for the interesting comments! Here's my take:
1) Ayaan is a convert to genuine Christianity. As I understand her story, she was depressed and suicidal in her atheistic worldview, tired every scientific remedy, and was finally saved (resurrected, born again) when she prayed to Jesus. She talks about cultural Christianity to point out that it's wrong to treat all religions the same (in particular putting Christianity and Islam together in the same basket), and because it points secular humanists to actual Christianity, which she found to be lifesaving.
2) While there may be some superficial similarities, I see wokism as being fundamentally opposed to the message of Jesus. Wokism is centered around dividing and accusing.
In the Bible, Satan is literally 'the accuser' and Diabolos literally means 'divider' or 'scatterer'. The gospels portray Jesus's religious opponents as the ones who were doing the accusing. The Pharisees judged themselves better than tax collectors and prostitutes. The chief priest, Caiaphas, accused Jesus and had him crucified. Jesus, instead, desired reconciliation through forgiveness ("forgive our sins as we forgive those who sin against us") and self-accusation ("take the plank out of your eye before you attempt the speck in your neighbors").
Jesus was a victim, but he didn't handle it in the woke manner. He didn't call for reparations, nor incite his followers to avenge him, nor ask the Jews to defund the Romans ("give to Caesar what is Caesar's"). Instead, on the cross, after being accused, betrayed, humiliated, tortured, and wrongfully sentenced to death, he uttered "Father forgive them, they know not what they're doing."
The impression I get about wokism is that it's an ever-hungry accusation machine. It devours everyone from long-dead slaveholders to celebrities who make a single politically incorrect joke. And forgives no one.
Kind regards,
David
I appreciate this comment. It has some of my thoughts, but written more coherently than I would have done.
Seconded!
Hello, David. Thank you for the warm reply. I appreciate it.
I can't speak to the genuineness of Ayaan's conversion. It's a matter between her and God. We may, with some humility, interpret it as a response to the trauma of her Muslim youth and she's right of course to point out the fundamental differences in morality between Christianity and Islam, a distinction those in the west often fail to realize to their own detriment.
I also agree with you that at the end wokeness and Christianity are in conflict primarily because Christianity's central message is forgiveness through Christ and the offer of eternal redemption while wokeness, as I've already pointed out, operates without the possibility of forgiveness.
However, the similarities, from where I'm standing, are much deeper than superficial but I guess that would take a longer reply to fully articulate. Have a good one.
Hi RI!
I suppose by spotlighting victims, wokism is closer to Jesus than, say, SPQR or what I know about Hinduism. And I am curious to hear more about the deep similarities you've found, if you have the time to explain them.
Kind regards,
David
PS To me, the NT also seems pretty anti-woke in its communion of all believers regardless of class, gender, or ethnicity. ("There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.")
Hello. I appreciate the reply.
I will try to articulate the many and deep similarities between Christianity and wokism. This might take a little while.
Wokism is more than just accusing and dividing others. It's a fine start but any religion or ideology can and has done that. Wokism has a set of attributes I've already listed but I will take them apart one by one to show how it connects to Christianity. In many ways, wokeism is Christianity's bastard offspring.
First off, wokeism is the understanding of historical and socioeconomic relations through the application of an oppressor-oppressed matrix centered primarily around gender, sexuality and race. In this way, it borrows from Marxist socialism but where Marxism's fundamental unit of analysis employs class struggle, wokeism is centered on race and gender struggle ( Many old school and classic Marxists don't like wokeism for that reason since they regard it and social justice warriors as a distraction from the important issue of class warfare).
But other than changing the centre of emphasis, the rest is largely similar. The oppressor exploits the oppressed and there can be no true negotiation between them because there's a power imbalance. The only resolution is extensive reparations. Note that unlike Marxism where the focus is the violent redistribution of material resources, wokeism wants this too but since it's more concerned with gender and race struggle, what it is after more specifically is the redistribution of status and representation( hence, why they are obsessed with changing traditionally heterosexual or white characters into other races and sexualities or flying pride flags across important seats of power). Note that both ideologies operate with a zero sum mindset: there's a fixed amount of wealth or status in this world, the oppressor class has historically hoarded it, and it is now time to redistribute it to the oppressed without consent.
Now, for the similarities with Christianity.
First off, Christianity has always been deeply sympathetic to socialism. Jesus has many messages condemning wealth, the early disciples lived in communal settlements where they shared everything equally. Indeed, over the centuries, many christian cults and sects such as the Arborites, Albigenses, the Society of the Free Spirit, and many more have preached a socialist paradise of sorts where all property is publicly owned, the family ceases to exist, and there is no distinction between thine and mine. One of the earliest works of socialist philosophy, More's Utopia, is heavily influenced by christian doctrine. For a longer, more thorough analysis, consult the first few chapters of Russian mathematician and philosopher Igor Shafarevich's landmark work on communism.
Indeed, it is in part Christianity's attitude towards usury and wealth that allowed social outcasts such as the Jews take up these roles in society and grow wealthy as a result. They were often resented by the christian communities for that reason, a resentment that ironically carried over into Marxism, famously in the anti semitic The Jewish Question, given that Marx himself was also a Jew. There is thus an interesting and deep connection between Socialism, Marxism, Christianity, and Wokeism, although all four are distinct from each other.
Second, the redistribution of status Wokeism is so concerned about finds parallels and antecedent in Christ's sermon on the mouth, an historical break with pre christian ideology where as Nietzsche often noted, the virtues of strength were extolled and the virtues of weakness such as humility, et cetera, were denigrated. Christianity is the first or at least most thorough to apply this inversion and instead assert that it is the meek, the poor, the needy, and so on who shall inherit the kingdom of God. Indeed, the tension between these two kinds of morality was discussed recently on this substack where Andrew Tate was cited somewhat misleadingly as an example of the Nietzschean ideal. Wokeism goes even further: The gay person but even beyond that, the trans person must receive more status than the heterosexual, the disabled must receive more status than the able-bodied ( it's no wonder that more people are claiming all kinds of disabilities now), minorities before whites, so on. In this moral framework, you are more moral based on how powerless you seem and how little harm you have done historically. You accord yourself status as an ally by cutting yourself down to size and shrinking yourself in support of those who have historically been mistreated( I don't even disagree on the premise here; I just think wokeism isn't the solution).
Third, consider how in Islam, the classical split between Sunni and Shia is over Muhammad's legitimate successor. It is essentially a power struggle, no different from a political succession. But in Christianity, the classical split between Catholic and Orthodox is philosophical, over the godhead of the Trinity. Christianity's fundamental split was over the nature of reality. I am straining here but I find similar echoes in today's pointless wrangling over gender and sexuality. The absurdity of such debates as how many angels can dance on the head of a pin is similar to the modern absurdity of how many genders there are, et cetera. You will find no similar philosophical conflicts in Islam or Judaism.
Fourth, I think it's certainly interesting that while there have of course been christians who have been terrorists eg the Irish terrorists during the troubles, there have been very few terrorists who performed their acts of terrorism in the name of Christ or Christianity. The Irish terrorists were embroiled in a political struggle over independence and their terrorism followed from this.
Contrast with Islam where terrorists often commit these ghastly actions in the name of religion and regard themselves as entitled to a divine reward for blowing themselves up.
However, Christianity has often featured witch-hunts to a scale and a degree unseen in other religions. Witch-hunts are interesting because those being punished are ostensibly christian but merely of a different faith and they are not wars as such but communal spasms of violence or ostracism which can be just as damaging( Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter is a memorable example).
Although a lot less severe, there is something to be said about how cancel culture often targets heretics for being just slightly out of line by fundamentally ostracizing them. It is, in my opinion, one of the darker attributes of Christianity which has of course survived into wokeism.
There are other similarities, of course. The fundamental differences, however, make Christianity a much more rewarding and wholesome ideology primarily because Christianity is at its heart, individualistic while wokeism is collectivist and Christianity always extends the possibility of redemption and forgiveness, at the very least as an ideal. Last but not least, wokeism is religious in character but not a religion while Christianity is a religion.
My thoughts on the subject are rather scattered and unpolished but those are my observations on the subject. If you have indulged me so far, thank you. Have a lovely one.
Hi RI!
Thanks so much for taking the time to explain all of this. Your connections are impressive, and I don't see anything that I overtly disagree with. Just three thoughts from my point of view:
1) I personally draw a bright line between Jesus's ministry and historical Christianity. Christianity is filled with immoral hypocrisy, and I agree that The Scarlet Letter and witch hunts and inquisitions are certainly a part of Christian history, but I don't read any legitimate justification for that behavior in the gospels. To me, it's important to separate Christ's ideal from what the screwed-up sinners did who claimed to follow him. Jesus gave us the highest morality humanity has ever considered, and part of his assessment is that humans are screw-ups and will always screw up.
2) As for Christianity and Marxism, I'd say that any good idea can become evil through coercion. I am pleased to see people being baptized... but I'd be horrified to witness it done by the sword the way Olaf Trygvesson did it.
Similarly, a few dozen people pooling their wealth and living communally to serve the poor is far different from assassinating the tsars and exterminating the kulaks. ("I am not Christ or a philanthropist, old lady, I am all the contrary of a Christ... I fight for the things I believe in, with all the weapons at my disposal and try to leave the other man dead so that I don't get nailed to a cross or any other place." —Che Guevera)
3) I agree that ostracizing just-slightly-out-of-line believers is a dark attribute of Christianity, but again, I don't see that grounded in Jesus's ministry. On the contrary, Jesus said "he that is not against us is for us." In the gospels (and Acts), it was the Jewish Pharisees and Sadducees who were wrangling over minor points of interpretation. Freud observed this as a universal social phenomenon and coined the term "narcissism of small differences".
Thanks again for sharing your thoughts! I wasn't familiar with Shafarevich and he seems very interesting!
Have a great weekend!
Kind regards,
David
> No, they are canvassing for Christianity as against Islam which courtesy of demographic change is now a substantial presence in the West.
And yet we motor along quite well together. The hysteria about Islam is in direct opposition to the power of Islamic countries who are getting pulverised by the west every 5 years or so.
Ayaan Hirsi Alis is part of that neo con cabal who want to fight Islamists by bombing or overthrowing secular leaders in the Middle East and North Africa, thus creating vacuums for Islamist movements to grow. You would think that would work only once, but it works every time.
Like Scott, I have no sympathy for "cultural Christianity," as described.
Many have claimed that the seeds of whatever-we-have-now lie, not in the loss of Christianity, but in Christianity itself. Nietzsche, hostile to Christianity, did so in On the Genealogy of Morality. Voegelin, friendly to Christianity, did so in The New Science of Politics. (Voegelin, and others like him, qualify this claim by saying it is heretical variants of Christianity that are at fault, not the orthodox kind.)
Whatever the details, I think it is a powerful observation that we did indeed try Christianity –– and got to exactly where we are. In order plausibly to make the argument that Christianity is the solution, one needs an additional account of what we'd need to do differently this time.
It's strange to blame Christianity for the bad stuff that happened when we stopped doing Christianity.
"The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried."
Kind regards,
David
If no one tried it in 2000 years of theistic rule, I'm happy to infer that human's won't try it again even if we bend our society towards trying to make them do it.
If I look into some "productivity" software, and it turns out to be difficult enough to use that productivity is not improved as a result, the software has in fact been found wanting.
Hi James!
That is the strange predicament of history. All people could love their neighbor as themselves, and if we did, society would become incredibly productive. Think about all the waste involved with making sure people can be trusted, contacts are honored, the truth is being told, software isn't malicious, etc.
Kind regards,
David
Iron could come out of the ground as conveniently-sized sheets and ingots rather than ore, which would save a tremendous amount of waste involved with crushing, smelting, forging... but, empirically speaking, it doesn't.
Ideal oracles could solve any (and thus, every) NP-complete problem as fast as an RNG can write down the answer. If somebody has such an oracle, they must be doing a heck of a job keeping it quiet.
Fig trees could bear fruit out of season, lions could lay down with lambs, and software could turn out bug-free on the first draft, if God willed it so. Apparently He has other plans, thus we need to do some things the hard way. http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/tasks-at-hand
Hi James!
Sorry, I don't follow your point here. It is possible for each of us to love our neighbors. Are you suggesting the reason we aren't doing that has something to do with the way iron is found in ores or other features of the natural world?
Kind regards,
David
Indeed I am. Boiling it down to one word, the problem is "entropy." Humans are not all the same, and we can't even precisely measure many of the most relevant differences. Coordination requires accommodating and/or overcoming those differences.
If someone intends to love their neighbor as themselves, but they don't know the back of their neighbor's hand as well as they know their own hand, are they actually, truly and effectively, loving their neighbor? Or are they loving the inaccurate image of their neighbor (with a slightly different hand, and whatever else) which exists only in their own mind?
They might, for example, knit a glove which perfectly fits a hand-shape they imagined their neighbor having, but is uncomfortable, possibly even injurious, when worn by the actual hand for which it was intended.
"That was not *true* Christianity"?
Hi Johan!
I personally draw a bright line between Jesus's ministry (the "Christian ideal") and historical Christianity. Christianity is filled with immoral hypocrisy, and I agree that crusades, indulgences, witch hunts, and inquisitions are certainly a part of Christian history, but I don't read any legitimate justification for that behavior in the gospels. To me, it's important to separate Christ's ideal from what the screwed-up sinners did who claimed to follow him. Jesus gave us the highest morality humanity has ever considered.
Kind regards,
David
That Christianity wasn't able to keep from decaying into bad-things-are-good is an important consideration. When we think of all the good things of the 1950's, we have to remember that it immediately decayed into the 60's.
The hope of cultural Christianity would be that we could do better the second time round. As for sincerity, it is not necessary to perjure yourself, just to encourage Christianity. Benjamin Franklin donated whenever a church was being built, I think, even though he didn't belong to any of them. Jordan Peterson has been saying lots of nice things about Christianity even though he can't seem to bring himself to believe it as fact.
What specific things will we change the second time around? How will it avoid the problems that happened the first time?
Scott's second argument, and the argument of many comments here, is that Christianity didn't prevent wokeness and therefore it can't prevent wokeness.
Although I'm comfortable calling religion a technology, Christianity isn't a set-and-forget civilization-maximizer. It's a set of values and claims that require personal commitment. The argument for cultural Christianity is that it works to sustain civilization when a sufficient number of people make that commitment. We now have our lesson, and the next time around we should be teaching the lesson of what happens when you don't make that commitment.
I think the real argument is actually the one Scott says he isn't interested in talking about here. I think Scott could accept your argument that we should push for more of this Christian Technology, except that he doesn't personally believe it and doesn't like lying about his beliefs.
What good things about the 1950s? A post-WWII economy?
Low, crime, high trust. Women and children could walk on the streets without fear. People got married and stayed married. The elite was educated. People knew their neighbors.
How much of what changed can be traced straight back to real estate speculation?
If housing is selected primarily based on eventual resale value, could turn out that the only thing you have in common with your neighbors is how they were able to do the same basic math and could afford a similar mortgage. http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/moral-dilemmas
The iconic uneducated elite is "Teflon" Don Trump, who got his money mostly from the real estate market despite not being a particularly competent businessman.
Inability to afford a house makes it harder to credibly commit to building a family, which seems like it could plausibly have some sort of impact on marital stability.
Crime and unsafe streets are particularly associated with inner-city slums, which result from landlords buying up real estate with obvious potential value (thanks to its proximity to the rest of the city), then letting buildings decay (to minimize expenses, both in maintenance and property tax), and vaguely hoping to someday resell to someone with a plan for converting it to actual value.
I am not sure one can make the argument that humans changed so much. What did change is technology and economics. The problem is not bad people. Few people really have power. How much power does a shareholder have over what their corporations are doing? Corporations are maximizing profit (that is why people own shares). If a human person would only think of maximizing profit, we would call them sociopathic. So not bad people, but sociopathic organizations are the problem.
I cant see what that would have to do with Christianity.
Agreed, I think modern capitalism (plus historical memory holing of what was bad in the past) explains everything Scott objects to about the present much better than any cultural/religious axis.
One of the more under looked and I think worthwhile angles here. People who are intellectually inclined like to explain things in terms of ideas, but... "People were persuaded by bad ideas so things are bad; we just need to convince them of the right idea and then things will be good" is I think too facile an explanation of long-term historical trends. "Ideology as superstructure" is an oversimplification in the other direction, but... The modern sexual landscape, for example, I think owes more to the pill and the washing machine and other technological --> economic changes (more demand for jobs requiring communication than brute strength/endurance etc) than a few feminist agitators and authors and/or loss of faith.
One of the things that struck me reading ACOUP is how much of culture and values is downstream of economics, technology, etc.
Projecting modern values into the past is just as dumb when woke people and conservatives do it.
Christianity seems like a more accurate depiction of reality than the one that preceded it, where you went to the temple and made sacrifices and the gods would battle it out on your behalf, or you would see something in a dream and that meant you should kill your friend/switch jobs/change your will.
Likewise Protestant christianity seems like a more accurate depiction than Catholicism where priests have special access to the divine and indulgences work.
Both of these "level ups" have beneficial effects on how people live their everyday life, and how society functions. When people convert to Christianity they spend less time and energy on sacrifices and look elsewhere for advice.
Likewise, what we have now is more accurate than christianity. It's not that great, but no consensus reality in history has been. They take a noisy path but generally progress in the right direction.
You can rest assured that the consensus reality you dislike will also progress towards truth.
Human extinction would stop that progression.
Well, at least it would stop us worrying about it.
>the gods would battle it out on your behalf
They never did this; they took sides but we had to do the battling.
exactly. Christianity was uniquely good for its time in comparison to the alternatives available. But we evolved out of it since.
I think of Christianity like some sort of our cultural grandma. Loved, but old-fashioned, wise, but a lot of things she says just no longer hold up. And that's okay.
This isn't my area of expertise (being wrong on the internet is), but the assertion that the 1880s to the 1930s "wasn't very religious" is very strange to me. Some German weirdo saying "God is Dead" didn't really have much effect on the widespread religious practices of the American populace. The whole temperance movement was essentially rooted in Protestant churches, which were also enjoying a major boom during that time. Perhaps you could say that the rarefied heights of the artistic and intellectual world were more atheistic, but I'd still be somewhat skeptical of that claim...
Let's say they were less religious compared to the middle ages.
Nietzsche was a weirdo, but he observed the contemporary trend *in Europe*, which pretty clearly went towards secular nationalism, especially in the most important countries (Germany, Italy, France, England).
As usually, statements like that only have regional validity. Even in Nietzsche's Europe, the Poles and the Irish were very religious. But his assessment was that these pockets wouldn't matter in the big picture, and he was right.
Interesting read. That is not how I have interpreted cultural Christianity. I hear the term and think of a person who lives mostly accepting the basic norms of Christianity and subsequent structure of society based on those norms, while not accepting the claims of universal truth, miracles and the divinity of Christ.
No need to claim to believe anything.
Same here, or more so — I'm familiar with "cultural Christianity" meaning stuff like wanting a day off on 25th December. I don't think anyone is arguing that social values and norms are deeply shaped by those trappings. I hadn't heard the usage that Scott is talking about.
People are using this term in different ways. I think we need a taxonomy here, so I hereby declare there to be four varieties of cultural Christian:
1) The Pragmatic Cultural Christian. A Christian of convenience who wants a day off at Christmas, wants an excuse to gorge on chocolate at Easter, and may pretend to be Christian to join a better or more convenient public school (quite common in England).
2) The Aesthetic Cultural Christian. Someone who feels some genuine attachment to the art, architecture, music, and rituals of Christianity, or enjoys the community of church. They may also feel a sense of cultural heritage, but probably doesn't have any stronger beliefs about the virtues of the Christian doctrine. (This, to me, is the "purest" cultural Christian.)
3) The "Personal Virtue" Cultural Christian. Someone who, despite not actually believing in the supernatural stuff, thinks that Christianity cultivates virtues that we should try to follow and teach to our children, but doesn't try to expand this to society at large. (This seemed the mainstream in my (English village) upbringing.)
4) The Civilizational Cultural Christian. Someone who makes macro-level intellectual arguments about how society needs the uniting civilisational virtues of Christianity that keep society functioning, and in order to fight the onslaught of Islam, hedonism, nihilism, fertilty collapse etc. (This is probably the rarest in "real life", but the most common in post-rationalist blogging circles).
If #4 is the rarest, perhaps that's because it's dependent on #3. If civilization is going to unite around Christianity to fight those enemies, there needs to be buy-in on the individual level. And I don't think that simply liking architecture or music is going to be enough motivation to stand up to these foes. Someone might like a beautiful building or classical music but that preference is no match when academe comes along saying that ionian columns are phallic and Mozart was racist.
Interesting. This very well may be correct. I am curious about #1, as i am unsure why that would have an impact on public school eligibility. I am in the US, so I am unfamiliar with the scenario.
I was a #2, but did not consider myself a cultural Christian, but a non-militant atheist. I just felt an affinity to the familiar experiences of my childhood in a very religious, Christian home.
Upon having kids, I shifted to #3, and would in fact consider myself a cultural Christian.
I never considered those as two points on the same spectrum, but can see how they may be a sliding scale.
For #1, I don't have data, but I have anecdotes!
My friend lives near to a small, good quality, in-demand Church of England village school, which his kids can walk to (potentially saving him hundreds of hours of school-runs over the next decade). The school has multiple criteria by which they select attendees, one of which is being a member of the local church. Because it's 2024, almost no-one under the age of 70 is actually a committed Church of England Christian, but it's a very good trade-off to pretend to be for a couple of years before your first child enters school. Somewhat ironically, my friend who I would actually consider a type #3/#4 cultural Christian, didn't do this, because he thought it was dishonest, and almost failed to get his daughter into the school.
Actually #1 is common in the US among middle class parents who want their kids to go to Roman Catholic primary schools but don't want to pay non-member rates; likewise those who attend nominal religious universities like Notre Dame or Marquette. Even with mandatory tithing you still come out ahead given the deep discounts members get.
That I understand, having attended a private religious university. It is the inclusion of public school that lost me. It seems to have been addressed, above, although my ignorance regarding the public school system in England is obvious!
Ah yeah I missed the public school part as well
You're working off a sample size of 1 here. Christian culture collapsed into postmodernism one time, the only time we've had, largely because it was confronted by unprecedented challenges and didn't see them coming. That's no rational basis for proclaiming that it would inevitably happen again.
Is there a rational basis for claiming Christian culture specifically is the solution, and not Hindu culture or something else?
If you don't like the west (or never did), then no.
Christianity was an essential part of western history for a long time, so if I argue that it played a role in how we are or were, that has a lot of prima facie validity, regardless of what you think.
If you look at India and think that that's actually a much better goal, then knock yourself out.
How do you know that it's the result of a specific religion that just takes thousands of years to develop, as opposed to just randomness or some other factor?
Vegetarianism is a lot more popular in Hinduism. So should we copy some aspect of that? Maybe that people can reincarnate into animals. Or do it like with Christianity. If banning gay sex means that 2000 years later gay marriage is accepted, maybe we need to ban vegetarian diets.
If five different loaves of bread and two different fish all succumb to the same strain of mold when left out on the kitchen counter overnight, I'm gonna want to see some actual evidence of novel mold resistance before accepting any claim that a truckload of more-of-the-same won't.
False analogy. We're not dealing with inanimate objects here; we're dealing with people who can learn, and groups of people that can adapt through communication and tradition.
The very fact we're dealing with groups means "christian culture" didn't only collapse "one time." Group members were affected individually, following peer pressure or opportunistic curiosity or personal conscience just like the spread of any previous heresy, yet consistently enough for a broad pattern to become clear. No single raindrop defines the river, no single pebble the avalanche. The race goes not always to the swift, nor battle to the strong, but that's usually the way to bet.
Yes, but the same is true of liberal culture, so the Cultural Christianity Argument (that liberalism inevitably fails at this task compared to Christianity) hasn't yet been supported.
Scott, liberalism *is* Cultural Christianity. That's its most definitive characteristic: the search for the blessings valued as "good" by Christian culture through mechanical means, without paying the price of Christian virtue traditionally required in order to obtain them.
https://robertfrank.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-prosperity
The ills identified are so miniscule, and the modern world has delivered so many riches and freedoms to so many people, this is a bizarre "through the looking glass" analysis. What fall, what decadence? Or am I going crazy? "wokeness" and corporate dei is a threat to civilization?? Have you lost all sense of proportion??
+1
Most court reporters in the US don't even understand African American English, which, given that they're arrested far out of proportion to the rest of the population, is an insane notion to me. They literally have one job. But no, *wokeness* is the thing we should focus on right now.
Wokeness and DEI are antithetical to the conditions that built the "riches and freedoms" that you love in the modern world. Consider the fact that 2/3 of 4th-graders in America are illiterate. Wokeness did that. How are we going to make the next generation of technological breakthroughs if we don't educate our children to even the most basic of standards?
"US scores in both math and reading have been trending up for decades"
Having lived in a Late Stage Communist country, impressive statistics mean nothing. On paper, we were a major industrial power, producing shittons of steel etc. In practice, people would queue for coveted goods such as washing machines, if they had a chance to get them.
"yet we do far more innovation than any other OECD country"
This is a stronger argument, but how much of that innovation is done by the adult immigrants whom you mention, and who weren't exposed to the farce of the US public school system in their youth?
> “Citation needed” for 2/3rds of US 4th graders being illiterate.
https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading/states/achievement/?grade=4
"The percentage of fourth-grade public school students performing at or above the NAEP Proficient level in reading was 32 percent nationally in 2022."
Definition of the term is found in https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/tdw/analysis/describing_achiev.aspx :
-----
The Board defined three achievement levels for each grade:
* NAEP Basic denotes partial mastery of the knowledge and skills that are fundamental for proficient work at a given grade.
* NAEP Proficient represents solid academic performance for the given grade level and competency over challenging subject matter including subject-matter knowledge, application of such knowledge to real world situations, and analytical skills appropriate to the subject matter.
* NAEP Advanced presumes mastery of both the NAEP Basic and NAEP Proficient levels and represents superior academic performance.
-----
So only 32% (slightly below 1/3) of 4th graders demonstrate reading proficiency beyond the bare basics. About halfway down the first page, you find a setting that says "Baseline". Clicking on "NAEP Basic" shows that across the nation, only 61% meet even the bare-minimum level. And honestly, that's simply pathetic. Anything below 90% for both levels constitutes a massive failure of the system.
> only a tiny percentage of the population are doing technological breakthroughs
Which just makes quality education for the masses all the more crucial. If it's a numbers game, you need to start from the highest baseline you can!
> Barriers to immigration of top talent is a far bigger barrier to innovation than anything from DEI or wokeness, and wokeness could be a net benefit to innovation if it removes those immigration barriers and makes the US a more attractive destination for top talent from other countries.
Yes, wokeness could be a benefit if it worked completely different from the way wokeness works. But then it wouldn't be wokeness anymore. It does not concern itself with attracting top talent, but rather, under a guise of egalitarianism and fairness, it does the opposite, calling you a bad person if you would prefer to privilege the top talent rather than indiscriminately letting in anyone who wants to be here even if they're utter human scum.
I expect that Nintendo had more to do with illiteracy than wokeness did.
Honestly, with UIs growing more sophisticated and story elements pervading games more and more universally as the hardware limitations that once kept them largely confined to the RPG genre fade into irrelevance, I'd expect the exact opposite: it's getting harder and harder to find games that are possible to play without being able to read.
This is more than countered by the increased total number of games. Take something like Minecraft for example, I've seen it played with little difficulty by someone who barely knows how to read. He just comes up with his own names for the items instead of reading what they are called.
Yeah. You don't have to play the game the way it was intended, you just have to find a way to play the game so that it's addictive to you. :-(
Set aside wokeness, the most obvious way modern culture is maladaptive is fertility falling below replacement levels. Robin Hanson made a series of posts on the issue (though it's really a sub-issue of maladaptive cultural drift) relatively recently and you can find many of them collected here https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/my-fertility-posts
Why say "set aside wokeness" and then talk about a great harm that was caused by wokeness? (They called it "political correctness" at the time, because they're constantly changing their names for themselves, but it's the same thing.)
The demographic transition began centuries ago in France. The term "woke" is relatively recent.
Not everything is about the US. Fertility has gone down in places like Tehran, Belgrade and Jakarta, all fairly distant from the US culture wars and having very different culture wars on their own.
In fact, the strongest correlation between total fertility and something social that you can get, is whether girls get education until the age of 15 or so. Once they do, regardless of the country, their total TFR drops to less than a half of their illiterate peers. All the other steps (with regard to total education achieved) are much less steep.
+10000
I agree! And also, the idea that our time has fallen from an imagined better past is as old as it gets. Every age feels that way. It's only an illusion that life in 1890 had anything over on us today (asthetics included). In fact, it's patently ridiculous, the world is SO much better now than then. Whatever the merits of Christianity, cultural or otherwise, it has nothing to do with our feeling of loss. Thus it's ever been.
I’d agree with most of that except the aesthetics, which is clearly rubbish. Medieval peasants could build better architecture, abs the renaissance produced greater art. TV is better now though.
Most old art sucks, and the rest is just selection bias and special pleading. Same with architecture and everything else.
Yes.
Do you imagine that advocating for Cultural Christianity means that we must also advocate for the elimination of indoor plumbing? Are you assigning the development of every helpful technology to the rejection of Christianity?
Don't worry: in a restored Christian monarchy you'll still be able to take antibiotics.
Please advocate for whatever religion or cultural norms you like. Characterizing today's world as fallen or decadent is specious. I would take 2024 over 1890 in absolutely every way.
Here you demonstrate that your above comment was a giant motte-and-bailey, where the motte is that technology (which nobody's proposing to reverse) and basic democracy (that predated the decline of Christianity) are better now than in the past...and the bailey is that now is better "in absolutely every way" than the past.
The former is obviously true but irrelevant, as nobody's arguing against it. The latter is a pure assertion that you've provided no argument for at all (and no engagement with the long list of bad things about the present that have been listed in many of the comments).
I'd submit that both motte and bailey are "everything is indeed better" and I hope you allow a little rhetorical flourish when I say "everything". Nearly, overwhelmingly, everything.
Not just technology and basic democracy.
The thrust of the article was anti-modernity and how we have descended into wokeness and decadence. Having reread it I'm yet more struck by how weak the rationale for overturning or returning to some earlier order is.
It's like saying I hate paper and printing and books because of an occasional paper cut.
There's been a lot of obvious problems with modernity mentioned, including crime rates, family breakdowns, children never born to committed families to begin with, below-replacement fertility, level of social trust, state of modern art and architecture, state of mental health and happiness in the population, and so on. Plus more debatable things like declining education level (it seems to me more people are going through school, but school is doing a far worse job on average for them, but I could be wrong). Could you list the counterveiling objective benefits of the present not related to technology or the existence of a liberal democracy?
(By objective I mean things like I tried to list above that near-everyone agrees are bad or good. So not things like maximal sexual freedom or too much guilt over slavery which they obviously don't.)
And then we might make some progress on this debate.
Crime: https://www.vrc.crim.cam.ac.uk/system/files/documents/manuel-eisner-historical-trends-in-violence.pdf [PDF]
Crime records in England going back to 1200. They are meticulous with record keeping. And also a broader analysis across other European countries. Look at chart after chart and trend after trend. Never in that recorded time have we had it as good as now. Unless you are referring to high crime in Sudan in the present time. In which case they are already neck deep in orthodoxy and tradition so you need some other solution for the civil war.
Out of wedlock births:
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/an-analysis-of-out-of-wedlock-births-in-the-united-states/
They are way up, so is single parent-hood. Lower stigma attached to this plus fall in "shotgun" marriages. You may think access to contraception and abortion is a net negative. I think it's a net positive, which does mean there are real costs but we are still better off because we can provide public support to poor children, EITC, etc. with greater freedoms. And personally, I would much prefer this world for my daughter than one of shame, ostracism, and abandonment.
May I suggest that the author and many commenters may be experiencing "declinism" -- viewing the past more favorably than the present due to cognitive biases. We all mistakenly think our childhood was a time of "simplicity" and "order" and "care freeness". Or that there was a golden age in some past time, and if only we could return to those norms, glory will be ours.
Yeah. The world has never been better, and that's held true for the longest time (it annoyed me that Covid put a brief dent in it and for a couple of years you could reasonably reply "well, 2019", to the question "when has the world ever been better?")
Thank you!!!
firstly, culture is a weak word, irs about how we travel, eat, educate, etc---- many cultures as there are people. Catholicism (lets forget
Christianity for now) Created
Western Civilization-
yes other civilizations like Egypt,
who were great engineers via the pyramids-
were death cultures- Aztec had human sacrifice-
African cultures, prob due to their
pantheism, were tribes n never
grew anything permanent to mans
improvement
as far as boring, whats more boring than todays art, music, literature, most of which is self absorbed n without an ontology
the great scientist like Pasteur
( no one greater than him)
spent their creativity on actual problems ( rabies was the aids of that time, P cured it in three days
as his nephew was bitten by rabid
fox, three days !)
today we spend trillions on space travel nonsense, and physics,
Neil's Bohr included, hold on to
quantum physics ( whose big idea was the Big Bang ) yet the Copenhagen experiment shows its limits n errors
Einstein seems the last to have some humility, ( the awful movie
'Oppenheimer' about an amoral third rate scientist who gets a bit of conscience after the bomb is used)
while Western civilization collapses,
much like Chaucers Pardoners Tale,
the sell is the goal
"Space travel nonsense" has the possibility of returning to an era of lots of cultures undergoing cultural selection. Global monoculture has less selective pressure https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/how-fix-cultural-drift
I'm sorry, but this is all a load of crap. Almost every sentence in this comment is incorrect.
The one example of the Sinosphere is enough to disprove your claims about culture. The Chinese empires were no more death cultures than the Roman, built through conquest, yes, but does not involve human sacrifice. Go back further, and you will find that human sacrifice is present throughout the entire world.
Furthermore, while it often isn't presented that way, the Chinese used to practice a form of pantheism as well, with deities like 土地公 ("lord of the land") and the planet Jupiter.
I assumed that I did not have to include the achievements of the Chinese, but in case you didn't know, these included the compass, paper, gunpowder, movable type printing, banknotes, and the spork.
The phrase "the Copenhagen experiment" has no referent, but I gather what you are referring to is the Copenhagen *interpretation* of quantum mechanics, which is semantically empty and has since been superseded by sensible physics like "taking the equations at face value", also known, for better or for worse, the many-worlds interpretation.
You also don't seem to realise the extreme irony of claiming that quantum mechanics is erroneous while using a device that quantum mechanics was essential in making possible to spread this drivel. Yet another irony is that you could've claimed quantum mechanics had a hand in almost anything and be correct, but you picked the one idea whose conception quantum mechanics had no hand in: the Big Bang. That was all general relativity, the one area quantum mechanics has failed and is still failing to subsume. Despite later elaboration using ideas from quantum mechanics, it was discovered by one person applying the entirely classical Einstein field equations to the universe as a whole.
And as for the claim that Oppenheimer was a third-rate scientist, well, his equations are still torturing physics graduate students to this day.
>
I assumed that I did not have to include the achievements of the Chinese, but in case you didn't know, these included the compass, paper, gunpowder, movable type printing, banknotes, and the spork.
Sporks, aside (which isn’t true as far as I can see) , that’s not great for thousands of years - at least two were independently found in Europe, and Europeans plainly used gun powder to greater effect.
OP was claiming that "African cultures, prob due to their pantheism, were tribes n never grew anything permanent to mans improvement [sIc]", and that all other cultures "who were great engineers via the pyramids- were death cultures- Aztec had human sacrifice- [sIc]". My comment was a response to those clearly absurd claims, by raising examples where these were achieved despite the conditions being met.
I suppose I didn't go over the many canals built across China, or the palaces, or the ziggurats, or the temples, or the terracotta warriors, or the Great Wall, or other feats od engineering, but I suppose I am still underestimating the average American population's knowledge of ancient China.
I did misremember: Sporks were used in ancient China, but they were not necessarily invented there. That's my mistake.
I’m not American. China is a great civilisation but that’s not an impressive list for thousands of years. But the rest of your points are good.
Shift the timeframe from 1–2000 AD to 500BC–1500 AD and they would be pretty much on par. Shift it back another 500 years and Europe is a cultural backwater and we'd be debating the Cultural Pantheism argument.
Although I'm in favour of putting our civilisation into historical perspective, which is what you're doing, I'm not sure you're engaging with the argument that the West at its peak has a rate of technological advance and infrastructure building and wealth generation utterly incomparable to the East at its peak.
I fell way from the cultural Christianity argument when one of the new atheists pointed out all the northern European countries are decades ahead of the US in terms of secularization and they seem to be holding it together pretty well. If there's a cultural decline that follows from the decline of Christianity, it seems like it will be decades away relative to the US.
"How did you go bankrupt?"
"Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly."
That's cute, but as it applies in this context, unfalsifiable.
Native-born Danish population hasn't grown for decades.
hmm, fair comment.
Europe is busily abolishing itself. Not that America isn't, but I don't see America even having an interstitial period of sitting around and enjoying life. When you are steering the ship, it is a bigger philosophical crisis to be going nowhere. America will be hurtling toward something for a while yet.
Western Europe has a serious problem integrating its Muslim immigrants, some of which seem to be more on a path of conquest than co-existence.
That said, this is random fluke of geography, because the Muslim world is close to Europe and far from the US. If the entities were switched, I doubt that the US would fare any better. Too much Islam will destabilize any secular society, and "too much" probably begins at 5 per cent of really religious mainstream Sunni Muslims.
If only. I did see a few Muslims protesting here outside a school teaching gender woo woo to primary school children but that’s been the extent of Muslim interference in local affairs, and sadly it didn’t work.
I think it's also a matter of culture. The US has an identity as "a nation of immigrants", which thus makes it much easier to assimilate people. European countries have ethnicity based identities, and that makes it a lot hard for immigrants to assimilate.
While true, second- and third generation Greeks or Italians are usually completely assimilated in, say, Germany.
Turkish people much less so, even though from the outside, they are the same Mediterranean type of person.
Same in the UK with Indians vs. Pakistanis. There is a huge dollop or religious apartheid in Islam, and it shows.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflections_on_the_Revolution_in_Europe
Good book on that, haven't read in a long time though so might be dated.
I too dislike the "Cultural Christianity" argument as you outline it, due to your first reason: you should not believe false things are true just because it results in a better outcome. I am a Christian first and foremost because I believe it is true: there is a God, he did incarnate and die for our sins, we can be saved, it is actually better to love your enemy than to hate him, etc. If it's not true, don't believe it. Veracity is one of the chief Christian values! How can you expect to act like a Christian if you are lying?
I disagree strongly with your second reason though, because it is simply not true. Yes, the sects of Christianity that accepted "modernism" have succumbed to modernism. But this is not the model Christian. Evangelicals, fundamentalists, Methodists and Catholics anywhere outside the West, Pentecostals, these traditions have not succumbed to modernism and are alive, well, and thriving. Those Christians who modernize stop being Christians, and become moderns. Those Christians who do not remain Christian. It is a tragedy that so many Christian sects and societies went down the modernizing route, but it wasn't inevitable. It was just a bad choice.
Of course, those sects that chose to modernize were also the most likely to espouse cultural Christianity: that it isn't true, but we should believe it anyway. No wonder they mostly abandoned Christianity with that kind of foundation. If you want a Christian culture, then you need a culture of Christians who actually believe the creeds. Cosplay Christianity cannot stand against modernization; your examples prove that.
Precisely! The parable of the sower comes to mind…
Basically all Christians except the Amish aren't insulated enough from modern culture and are just following it with a lag, as evidenced by their dropping fertilities.
Fertility for Americans who attend church weekly has remained consistently above replacement for the last 40 years, with no decline. There has been significant declines for Americans who are religious but don't attend church weekly: in other words, the Christians most likely to have "modernized" or be solely "cultural" Christians.
https://www.christianitytoday.com/2022/08/birth-rates-church-attendance-decline-fertility-crisis/
If you graphed by denomination, they would all show a decline.
Do you have any data to back up that assertion?
We don't have great fertility data broken down by denomination. The best I can find is from Pew, from 2015. They have Evangelicals at 2.3, Mainline at 1.9.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/05/12/chapter-3-demographic-profiles-of-religious-groups/pr_15-05-12_rls_chapter3-07-png/
Did you look at the data in the link? Among Christians attending church weekly fertility is the same as it was in 1982. How can that happen if all Christian denominations were declining in fertility over the same time period?
A single snapshot can't say anything about a decline. But I assume you know that fertility used to be significantly above replacement.
If you’re talking about a decline from 1900 then yes, everybody’s declined. In 1982 the national fertility rate was 1.83, today its 1.78, and between that same time the “weekly church” crowd fertility has remained constant.
That 2.4 replacement number covers people dying. Does it also cover people leaving to become moderns?
For Evangelicals in America at least the answer is yes. In 1973 20% of Americans were part of Evangelical churches, in 2021 22% of Americans were.
https://www.christianitytoday.com/2021/07/mainline-protestant-evangelical-decline-survey-us-nones/
For the world as a whole, the Christian fertility rate just makes up for the loss of people from "leaving to become moderns". According to Pew based on conversion and fertility trends, they expect that by 2050 Christians will be 31.4% of the global population: the exact same share they had in 2010. Over the same period they expect Christianity to lose about 66 million people to "deconversion", with almost all of them becoming religiously "unaffiliated" which basically means your average secular modern type.
Notably, because of the lack of fertility among the "unaffiliated" despite an expected gain of over 61 million "converts" from other religions Pew expects the percentage of unaffiliated to drop from 16.4% of global population in 2010 to 13.2% in 2050.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/04/02/religious-projections-2010-2050/
That's interesting. Thank you.
Here’s another interesting fact, London is the most religious part of the U.K., rural Scotland the least.
The Amish are pretty isolated but they are still impacted by trends in fertility
https://x.com/lymanstoneky/status/961697119353569281?t=BDMPs_D7oQt57XDeTTENIA&s=19
Mormons?
Not insulated enough.
I came here to write something very similar to your first point - thank you for doing it so eloquently. I'm reminded of a section from the Screwtape Letters here:
"On the other hand we do want, and want very much, to make men treat Christianity as a means; preferably, of course, as a means to their own advancement, but, failing that, as a means to anything—even to social justice. The thing to do is to get a man at first to value social justice as a thing which the Enemy demands, and then work him on to the stage at which he values Christianity because it may produce social justice. For the Enemy will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of Heaven as a short cut to the nearest chemist’s shop. Fortunately it is quite easy to coax humans round this little corner. Only today I have found a passage in a Christian writer where he recommends his own version of Christianity on the ground that “only such a faith can outlast the death of old cultures and the birth of new civilisations”. You see the little rift? “Believe this, not because it is true, but for some other reason.” That’s the game,
Your affectionate uncle,
Screwtape"
The thing is they don't believe them to be true, they believe them to simply be best for society, i.e. low on religion, high on religiosity. It's not a bad thing either as sometimes they eventually convert but more importantly, their kids or grandkids do. Nobody converts to Aztecism because all of its practitioners are dead. It's irrelevant if Ōmeteōtl is real or not if nobody is around to remember he exists.
The reason that many people change is because the world around them has changed. The ideals and frameworks of religious practice and philosophy were created by a powerful elite during times of cruelty and overbearing control of the masses.
We have evolved to the point where we can see through the wishes of the elite - to maintain control over their 'subjects' through fear of punishment at the end of their lives - and we are no longer naive enough to believe in the myths that they created or the wealth and power they amassed in their humble service...
If people have moved away from the 'core' of Christisn belief, it's because it no longer has social, political or economic relevance and seems to want to remain anchored in a past where ignorance was the principle means of control.
This is known as entropy. Things tend toward chaos and separation from their original state. It's not possible to go back to a previous time or state.
To you, different movements are 'false', to them you are in denial of the reality of living in a modern world where power is fundamentally an archaic and. corrupt artefact and the wish to wield power is not a characteristic of enlightened thinking.
Surely you must know the response to this right? Just like the model Christian hasn’t succumbed to modernism, the model liberal atheist hasn’t either! Lots of groups we can point to who have embraced liberal norms and not fallen for wokeness or brutalism. You’re still missing the analogy!
Among other things, such arguments are ultimately insulting than ordinary atheism - that don't say that Christianity's truth claims are wrong, they say that the truth claims don't matter.
Atheists aren't all alike, and while an atheist might believe that always telling the truth is good, many do not--- marxism, for example. A hard question for anyone, atheist or not, is why we shouldn't all pretend to believe X, and even deliberately induce ourselves to believe X, if believing X will make us healthier, safer, and happier. Mormons seem to live good lives; why not encourage Mormonism, even if it is false?
Having known some ex-Mormons, I'd say the coercion is a problem. Nowhere near as bad as the Scientologists, but pretty intense.
As a practicing Mormon, I take stories about "intense coercion" with a grain of salt. My family traces its roots in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints clear back to it's founding, yet when my sister stopped going to church, and married a non-Mormon, my parents didn't disown her or raise the roof. Instead they had the wedding at our house. When I was at my parents' for Thanksgiving one year, they also had over a same-sex couple that lived down the road. And they aren't outliers either. All my life I was taught at church that it was important to be good to everyone, whether they eventually got baptized or not, whether they stay active or not. While I can understand others having different experiences (bad apples in every barrel), the concept of the crazy fundamentalist family that beats their kids, disowns them when they go their own way, and never associates with anyone or anything outside their tiny bubble is as foreign to me as the hippie lifestyle.
As another practicing Mormon who grew up in the "bubble" (ok, bubble-adjacent) of the heavily Mormon areas of the West, I fully agree.
Not only that, my older 2 brothers left the church a long time ago. And my parents have gone through hell trying (in the bad years) to maintain contact. It wasn't us who rejected them--rather the reverse. Things are better now, but they weren't then. And my parents were not exactly highly restrictive.
>Mormons seem to live good lives; why not encourage Mormonism, even if it is false?
"We're going to take away everything you know and love if you don't listen. So smile for the camera!"
Congratulations, you've invented society.
My dad grew up Mormon. He spent day after day in church learning things he knew could not be right and that were at odds with common sense and modern science. He and his brothers were miserable. They reached adulthood, left home, attended Cal, and promptly became far happier than they’d ever been. They never looked back.
Mormonism doesn’t create happy people. Some are happy. But there are tons of unhappy Mormons. Many either leave or are booted from the faith or lie about how they feel because they fear being ostracized.
If you build your methodologies on falsehoods, you can’t troubleshoot them. If you believe a sun god powers your car and it eventually breaks down, you’ll never even consider popping the hood.
My experience has been largely the opposite. The vast majority of Mormons I know are happy, not because they pretend everything's perfect; many are quite open about their struggles, but they view the Gospel as their lifeline. I've known those who've left the church that pretended to be happy but it was quite evident they weren't. (Also see my comment above).
As for science and "common sense", I get that not everything can be explained through religion...yet. But not knowing everything doesn't take away from the knowledge I do have, and the experiences I've had within the church that brought me peace I haven't found anywhere else.
When you say the LDS church brought you peace you haven't found anywhere else, I’m genuinely glad to hear it, just as I’m sure you’re glad to hear of my dad’s peace outside of it. From what you said about not being able to find peace anywhere else, I take it you’re a convert, or that you’ve been both inside and outside the church, like my dad and uncles. If you don’t mind my asking, what was it about the LDS church’s specific scripture that most convinced you it was the truth?
I was born and raised in the Church, (again, see my reply to The Digital Entomologist further up the thread), but I'm a "convert" in the sense that I have a testimony of Christ and the restored gospel, as opposed to just going through the motions. As the kind of geek who would find his way to a blog like Astral Codex and stick around, I'm plenty familiar with alternate creeds and philosophies. I've seen all the arguments against religion, Christianity, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints specifically, and ultimately I found them all wanting. It's not just any specific scripture or grand spiritual experience that has kept me in the Church, it's a broad combination of things.
First, I was fortunate to be raised by loving parents who've lived a Christ-like lifestyle, without fanaticism or hypocrisy.
Second, living the church lifestyle has kept me out of the gutter; no drugs or alcohol, no STDs or unplanned pregnancies, no jail time...
Third, the inspiration of my ancestors. One of them, Cyril Call, at one point had a mob come to his home and say, "Neighbor, we like you, just sign this document renouncing Joseph Smith and we won't have to burn your house down." His response: "You may as well apply the torch." That's not a belief you adopt out of mere convenience.
Fourth, and most important, the feelings I've gotten serving in the church, reading the scriptures, attending the temple, and serving a mission, are unlike any other good feelings I've experienced. The peace, the purpose, the "rightness", I can't deny. I realize this is completely personal and subjective, but it's my own lived experience.
Thanks for answering. I am convinced the correctness of the church is clear and unmistakable to you, or else you wouldn’t have persuaded others through your mission to stake everything on its validity.
Certainty like yours is foreign to me. I’m chronically uncertain. I find I’m always holding mistaken beliefs, and the only way I can identify and correct them is to doubt them all and accept any reasonable evidence that contradicts them. For instance, I don’t know if god exists. I can’t prove it either way. I’m even less certain Jesus was his son. Or that Jesus traveled to North America after his death. Or that Joseph Smith wasn’t mistaken in his recollection of translating golden plates for an angel with the help of stones and his hat between 1827 and 1829. This is all possible, I guess, as far as anything is possible, but it’s difficult for me to understand why it’s obvious that this is a) true and b) the most vital thing anyone can learn.
My family is much like yours. They were among the first Mormons to arrive in Utah. But some of them eventually found the stories behind the church’s claim to divine authority at odds with testable knowledge about the world. Despite this, we don’t have STDs and have managed to stay out of the gutter and jail much like you.
To me, if you put aside the scripture, what you have in the Mormon people is an admirable community of close-knit, prosperous folks who try very hard to do the right thing. But they are not perfect and it’s worth considering they may be mistaken about some matters. As I said, I’m glad you found the truth. I’m not sure how you did it, or how you know you did it, but I’m also not sure about most things.
Hey Freddie, congratulations on your big news! Best wishes to you and Ami!
Thanks!
I suspect that someone is going to successfully come up with a Totally Not A Religion based on the simulation argument. It already has a plausible argument(for the rationalist) for God, you just need some kind of rule set. I could also see someone tying Christianity and the simulation argument together.
Hopefully someone figured it out because our society’s nihilism is going to lead people to argue that AI is better than us and we should let ourselves be supplanted by them.
>I could also see someone tying Christianity and the simulation argument together.
Maybe the explanation for the Incarnation of Christ could be the simulator briefly visiting inside the simulation.
Sure but then the question is why anyone should believe that.
because there's quite a lot of good evidence for it, both historical and non-historical
even little things like "oh, of course the world would converge on using the date of the simulator's arrival on our timeline as the basis for the calendar"
Probably it's an ethical requirement from their IRB: don't do anything to sims that you wouldn't do to yourself.
> "Even the Middle East is gradually becoming less Muslim. "
Is it? Half a century ago Lebanon had non-muslim majority. Iran, Turkey and Afghanistan had secular governments. In most ME countries that are still ruled by officially secular governments wearing of burqas seems to have become significantly more common.
I think its mostly Christians who left and I imagine its mostly them who secularized.
Unfortunately that's my impression too
A lot of the backsliding has to do with pushback against the chronic American/ Western meddling in Muslim majority countries that allowed the worst elements of those countries to come to power.
I thought the backsliding was precisely due to American intervention.
I think a fair bit of that is aggressive proselytization by the Wahhabi sect, a strict version of Sunni Islam which has pushed out many other varieties. It's sponsored by the government of Saudi Arabia, and thus gets a pass from the US government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wahhabism
Though mind you the final paragraph of the lede in that article says that the Saudis are pulling back on Wahhabism and placing more emphasis on nationalism instead.
I'd guess that's a result of the new leader disliking independent domestic power bases, rather than a commitment to any position I'd endorse. And I'm highly dubious that it will have any immediate effect on the continuing spread of Wahhabist teaching outside Saudi Arabia.
People are becoming more secularized.
Governments aren't.
https://x.com/MaxCRoser/status/1185895820555640832
Everything decayed after WW1. So if you reset everything and then successfully avoided a world war, you might be able to avoid the 20th century loss of faith problems.
I think WW1 made the biggest dent in Christianity. Much bigger than technology or democracy or modernisation.
I think WW1 is the worst that ever happened. It killed the spirit of optimism in Europe, who then infected America with their malaise and also led to Stalin, Hitler and all kinds of bad things.
Agree with this. Scott’s “1880-1930” here is a weird era. EVERYTHING changed after the charnel house of Europe in WW1.
For a great read on this: the first several chapters of “Into The Silence” by Wade Davis which is mostly about the British Everest expeditions of 1921-1924 but the first third of the book is about how WW1 reshaped society. Even the devout didn’t come out of that Hell on earth with the same view of a loving God that they had before.
Did you intentionally avoid mentioning Christmas, Halloween etc.? They are clearly cultural imports from Christianity, but they are also wholesome family fun for a lot of the members of our shared society and I think we would all be worse off if they didn't exist.
I would much rather dwell on the fringes of it than have it abolished outright. From the title I was expecting this to be taking the side of "Christmas in America is bad from a saecular perspective" in the "Is Christmas in America bad from a saecular perspective?" debate, this seems to be rebutting an argument I have never encountered.
>Did you intentionally avoid mentioning Christmas, Halloween etc.? They are clearly cultural imports from Christianity, but they are also wholesome family fun for a lot of the members of our shared society and I think we would all be worse off if they didn't exist.
There's nothing special about Christmas and Halloween. Those could easily be replaced with Lunar New Year and the Ghost Festival.
Absolutely, but in our culture they haven't been, and if we got rid of them I expect we'd have nothing as opposed to immediately picking up their Asian analogues.
I think Europe has done a better job of keeping the fringes of Christianity than America has. The line between Christianity and atheism is much brighter in America. Atheists can still say the Lord’s Prayer here and attend Holy Communion and go to church at Easter. Once you become an atheist in America, you are out.
Hi, I'm an atheist in America who still goes to church on Easter if I'm in the area.
Edit: But on further reflection, mine does seem to be an uncommon situation.
In Europe they absolutely can not unless they misrepresent themselves to the priest; unless they are Protestant and in that case, it would be true in the US as well as Protestants let everyone partake sans belief in anything everywhere.
I was talking about protestants, not Catholics. But I wasn't referring to the behaviour that the church allows or disallows. I meant how the culture and how other non-Christians react. Atheists rarely go to Holy Communion or midnight mass in America. They definitely wouldn't say The Lord’s Prayer.
Ah fair. I thought you were saying Churches prevent them from participating as opposed to what you were trying to say, my bad.
Yeah I can agree with that observationally. My siblings are atheists and they can't even be bothered to be polite and respect a moment of silence during grace or enter a church for a wedding; I distinctly remember one of my kids once, and not too young but a tween so old enough to ponder, asking "why anytime their uncle or auntie visit they refuse to hold hands when grandma says grace". In fact they are so outright hostile to religion I've seen them skip funerals of friends and family for daring to have a priest there. And no not youthful rebellion, all of us are well into our middle ages and no it's not just them, I've seen the same look of outright contempt and derision when I cross myself in public by people I know to be atheist.
I'd say American atheism is more an outward militant rejection of religion whereas in Europe it's more of religious apathy bordering agnosticism in my experience from living on both continents. I found my atheist German friends never even really thought about religion whereas my Americans ones were consumed with it.
Right. I agree with all of that. Plus…
When I came back to England after 24 years in the States, I (atheist) went to Evensong based on a recommendation from Richard Dawkins. I ended up going 3 or 4 times a week and often took (atheist) friends with me. I went to church occasionally in California but never with other atheists.
I think the biggest difference is that people my age (approaching 60) sang hymns and said prayers in school every day (it was the law) in England. We all have fond, cultural memories of it even if we didn't literally believe it. We were and are cultural Christians.
>I'd say American atheist is more a outward militant rejection of religion whereas in Europe it's more of religious apathy bordering agnosticism in my experience from living on both continents. I found my atheist German friends never even really thought about religion whereas my Americans ones were consumed with it.
This is a very defined subset, but not every American atheist is so stunted and trapped in 2013 that they resort to performative antisocial behavior like that. However, a normal person wouldn't label themself an "Atheist"
I think the steelmanned argument SA should tackle is not that Christianity is the predecessor of “what SA likes” (WSAL), but an essential ingredient of WSAL. Sure, it’s not an ingredient that ensures that WSAL will last forever, but there will be no WSAL without this ingredient. Maybe we need Christianity plus another ingredient or just a more resilient version of Christianity that doesn’t give way to too much atheism. This version of the argument requires an empirical refutation not merely a logical one like the one proposed here.
You always have to remember that the Abrahammaic cults all derive from marginal arid-land herder culture which values cattle over human life and is full of morally repugnant concepts like scapegoating which is Christianity’s foundation. The fact that half the New Testament was lifted word for word from Epictetus is no saving grace either. Nietzsche was right about a couple of things. And we see the whole middle east consumed by absolute bullshit that us Northern Europeans should never have allowed ourselves to be drawn into. Let them destroy themselves.
"The fact that half the New Testament was lifted word for word from Epictetus is no saving grace either."
I do not think this is true, either in literal sense, or as hyperbole. It seems wild that someone would say this.
Aside from anything else, a good portion of the New Testament was written before Epictetus began teaching philosophy.
A quick google tells me that he was born in AD 50 and died around 135AD. After Jesus, after St Paul’s epistles and after most of the New Testament. This kind of rhetoric is why I stopped calling myself an atheist a while back. Though I still don’t believe.
Where are you getting your dates from?
https://books.google.com/books/about/Epictetus_and_the_New_Testament.html?id=7J_4wwEACAAJ
The only way out of modernity is through, eh?
We had to pass it to find out what was in it.
I must be missing the point of this. There have been prior Christian cultures which had worse aesthetics, and some which had better, especially when you think about the distribution of aesthetics. The decline in esthetics (degeneration, if you wish), arguably has more to do with the death-grip rise of late-stage capitalism than with a decline in Christianity. And of course, this ignores aesthetics in non-Christian cultures, such as in India and China.
Also, factually, this is just factually wrong. Reform Judaism came before Conservative Judaism; Conservative Judaism was arguably a reaction to Reform Judaism.
As far as the quality of art goes, people have been wondering forever why it tanked after the Roman Empire Christianized. There's no obvious reason that would happen.
But, it does tend to undermine the idea that quality artwork requires a background of Christianity. The power of Christianity seems to have a pretty strong negative correlation to the quality of artwork, with realistic Roman portraits giving way to vague blobby Christian ones as the Dark Ages begin and then coming back as the Renaissance arrives.
The simple explanation would appear to be that the quality of artwork is negatively related to poverty - it's expensive to develop the skills - and the power of organized religion is positively related to poverty. But this theory has trouble explaining why official imperial portraits deteriorated so badly. Poverty can't have been the problem there.
<i>As far as the quality of art goes, people have been wondering forever why it tanked after the Roman Empire Christianized. There's no obvious reason that would happen.</i>
It didn't -- it "tanked" (or rather, became less realistic -- it still looked nice, aesthetically speaking) during the Third-Century Crisis, when the Empire was not only still pagan, but engaged in periodic bouts of anti-Christian persecution.
If we are judging art by how realistic it is then this era is going to get a pretty bad reputation from future historians.
Christians never claimed that pagans couldn't make works of beauty. That's a symptom of atheist culture (one that does not believe in metaphysics), not pagan (one with mistaken metaphysics).
Edgy atheists are wrong when they claim that atheism is to monotheism as monotheism is to polytheism. Christians can see a lot of truth in e.g. Neoplatonism; Christian missionaries often work by claiming - with full sincerity - that Christianity is the full revelation of truths discovered in part by other religious traditions. Atheism isn't just rejecting one more god, it's rejecting a way of seeing the world common, at its most fundamental level, to almost every human culture throughout history.
But, yes, artistic quality is often a function of money and stability. Artists need money to pursue their vocation full time, and engage in costly projects, and entire communities of linked professions are required to build things like the Hagia Sophia. (Eastern) Rome was capable of great art again by the 500s, not just grand buildings, but excellent portraiture and mosaic work. Then it degraded due to the devastation of the Islamic conquests, and eventually Western Europe surpassed it - but Italy was churning out artistic masterpieces centuries before the Renaissance, when the greatest painters were still working on icons.
IMO, high art dies when it becomes about expressing the ego rather than pursuing beauty. The art world fully embraced egoistic expression over service to a higher ideal in the wake of WW1; that's why everything looks like crap nowadays. If you're disillusioned with higher ideals, and think there's nothing but the world and will, how could it be otherwise? There are far more ways to be original and ugly than original and beautiful.
The other interesting factor is pigments. Pigments require both chemistry / alchemy / scientific-ish knowledge, AND robust trade networks, because both pigments and raw source materials come from various far flung and outlandish places.
Creating esthetically appealing representational art is fundamentally a "tacit knowledge" sort of domain too. If you have one civilizational upset that kills off most of the masters and apprentices, you're kind of boned from there on, because people will have to relearn and reinvent techniques from scratch - see the Renaissance.
The shift from the Roman / Greek wax-encaustic style to paint-on-canvas / other surfaces likely also played a role.
Philip Balls book "Bright Earth" talks about much of these things - I wrote a review here where people can see if they'd be interested in reading the book itself:
https://substack.com/@performativebafflement/p-148905508
Seems like the rebuttal to the ultimate failure of restoring either 1890s norms or 1700s Christianity is that if most everyone were convinced it was a good idea they would have the lesson of 1960-2020 to remind them that what they have is fragile. But we’re a long, *long* way from convincing most everyone that it’s at all desirable to do one or the other. So it’s kind of moot.
Has anyone got a link for context on where Ayaan Hirsi Ali is coming from more specifically?
Her wikipedia bio says "She is a critic of Islam and advocate for the rights and self-determination of Muslim women" so I wouldn't have guessed that she was arguing in favor of a return to Christianity.
I don't know very much of the context but she recently converted to Christianity after being atheist, and had a coming out article that went somewhat viral in which she outlined her reasoning: https://unherd.com/2023/11/why-i-am-now-a-christian/
> The fact is, it is much easier to assimilate Muslims into liberal atheism or highly tolerant forms of Christianity (like Quakers have been running a successful school in Ramallah for over a hundred years with no interference from local Palestinian Muslims) than to “civilizational war” Christianity.
...So why haven't they done it yet? The liberals have been in power for a long time, and they've made practically zero progress towards actually pacifying these peoples.
> The Muslims in the US seem pretty liberal. On abortion, they are more liberal than Catholics and black Protestants:
Which is why the US conservatives fear of Islam is such nonsense. But then 80% see Iran as a threat, which is the same number who can’t find it on a map.
So the west can integrate Muslims in the one country where there is more hysteria about the Islamic threat, than anywhere, and the result of the anti Islamic rhetoric generally ends up with some destruction of a secular country and the rise of militant Islam
Not unique. Conservatives worldwide tend to distrustful of each other because by definition they strongly believe in their own culture/religion etc. Liberalism is universalist ideology, an Arab liberal, American liberal, and an Indian liberal probably believe similar things, just a matter of degree. Conservatism is localist ideology. American conservative love of guns doesn't translate to a Japanese conservatives love of the Emperor.
You assume the liberals have been in power for a long time, when most of the Middle East is still a warzone.
Liberals have been in power in the west for a long time, and attempts to integrate Muslim immigrants have been a dismal failure.
In the same way that integrating Christians have been a dismal failure: You don't hear about the successes.
Thanks!
The mention of "civilizational war" suggests to me that she's not quite making the same argument that Scott is.
I find this cultural Christianity argument especially silly because my strong perception is these people don't at all mean the 1890s when they say Retvrn. The imagery is Crusades, Benedictine robes, idyllic mediaeval villages. Oddly I find it has something in common with regrowth environmentalism.
The pretension that anyone who has accepted modernity ought to help them is strange. I personally get the appeal they're going for, it ends up on my feed and friends send me reels in this style, but it's so obviously a hollow larp. If they were serious they'd be getting out there and living it.
Maybe they are, mind you, maybe that sort of thing is kept off the internet. I don't think a mediaeval village (with near exclusively white people, odds on) would last under the ire of the modern state. One glance from a middle aged bureaucrat and it gets messy. All that to say we might be a little harsh on this viewpoint since anyone who follows the ethos to it's conclusion doesn't stick around to make their case.
Then again sans ladies it won't happen, so I doubt it.
My image of a medieval village is anything but idyllic in the first place.
Matter of what you value I guess.
What you and they think of as medieval is actually a vision of "medieval" mediated by the 19th century imagination.
Of the folks I'm talking about, I think you're right, but I personally think I've got a nuanced point of view. We've lost a great deal in the march into modernity. Maybe it's worth it, but some of us look back with sadness.
Thanks. What I was trying to say was the RETVRN those people are looking for might have more in common with 1890 than you or they realise. E.g I'm Catholic and go to the traditional latin Mass. Whilst I strongly believe what I'm doing is in continuity with medieval culture, the liturgical culture I support is that of c.1850 - 1960. E.g frequent communion does have some pedigree but it did fall out of use in places and was vigorously promoted by Pius X at the turn of 19th/20th century.
Interesting point. Reminds me of how most Viking revival aesthetics have no roots past Wagnerian romanticism.
I don't feel vulnerable to this criticism myself though. I've gotten my ill feelings about modernity and admittedly romantic feelings about mediaeval times from reading of a time before industrialisation, the times when commons still existed, and man lived closer to a state of nature. Nature in the sense of an emergent pattern, infinitely complex like the unfolding of a living creature, and undisturbed by the Cartesian cult of measurement and rationality that would break the world against our whims. Now our reality is an invention of our hubris, our abstracted and rootless fancy. I envy you that you have religion in these times, I've never been to a church service myself.
Of course I would choose today on the balance. High child mortality, dogmatic religion, pervasive and hard poverty, I wouldn't want them back and they come in that package. But I won't then ignore what we have lost, and I sincerely wonder if all this can last if we remain estranged from nature.
Yes, Christianity descended into wokeism, but the people pushing it in this direction in the beginning didn't know that's where things were headed. Are we not allowed to learn from our mistakes? To try cultural Christianity again recognizing where it's weak points were, and patching them?
Sure, but that argument applies to anything. Try the New Deal again while patching the weak points. Try Golden Age Islam again. Heck, try Communism again! What you need is an argument that Christianity has a unique benefit beyond other ideologies or belief systems.
A mathematical translation of the sermon on the mount is: “You can use a greedy algorithm to obtain a future outcome far better than your ability to plan for. Instead of trying to control the branching space of future possibilities, All you have to do is, aim at the highest good you can think of each morning, and then focus on the problems of the day. The ROI of doing good things goes up much more if you’re voluntarily suffering to do those good things.”
This is predictive theory and can easily be tested by anyone who is interested. I think this core is what made Christianity produce such powerful cultures, and it’s accessible to anyone of a scientific bent, even an atheist. All you have to do is try it and see how it works for you. It does require pretending that “good” means something real, but the only real barrier there is willingness to try the experiment.
This might be good advice, but where are you finding it in the Sermon on the Mount? Maybe 6:25-34, where Jesus says to focus on doing the will of God and not worry about where your next meal and clothing will come from? I don’t see how to read it in your way without some extremely aggressive heresy, especially not when it comes to being testable. The Kingdom of God is not of this earth; almost the entire point of the religion, not to mention other parts of this is very sermon, is not to look for your reward in the kingdom of man.
Humans gonna human. There are still some kinks to work out, but we'll get them worked out at some point. Ultimately, the organized are more powerful than the violent even if there are regressions, and we might be heading into one of those regressions as we speak. But seeing the world clearly is important; and shedding superstition, while it may not happen in our lifetime, will be an important part of advancing civilization.
We won't get them worked out if we go extinct (which will eventually happen on a long enough timescale).
I think we’ll eventually get this worked out too. We have a couple of hundred years before it gets existence-threatening and culture and/or technology will have figured something out by then.
My current expectation isn't actually that we go extinct, but we can decline for a long time before bouncing back. https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/how-long-will-population-fall
The idea of selection effects causing the growth of families with high fertility is interesting.
It seems this argument only holds if we believe that the progress of a religion is inevitable from any given starting point. If we think that the progression to modernity was contingent on something else, then you might argue that you could retvrn to Christianity and stay there.
I'm much more interested in the argument about whether morality, meaning, purpose, etc. can be established on a secular foundation. I think they can and should be, but this seems to be a minority view.
I also think we shouldn't give up on the “but it's not actually practical to believe false things” argument, that seems important.
I doubt atheism itself is the reason for less crime, much more likely that atheists are generally more intelligent, and intelligent people are much less likely to commit crime or at least much less likely to be caught...
Can morality be established on a secular foundation? Sure. Jeremy Bentham already did that. It's just likely to be some form of utilitarianism because deontological ethics is harder to establish without some form of religion. And it is unlikely that whatever the society comes up with will stay secular.
Human beings need something to believe in and they have a tendency to believe in the irrational. Ergo, quasi religious beliefs will pop up. I will venture and say no civilization can last a full century without some kind of religion stitching the populace together.
Individuals can be atheist and moral. Societies cannot be atheist. Societies are brought together by myths. Those myths become religious in character if not in substance. This is the distinction that the New Age atheists failed to consider. They had imagined a world of sober, moral atheists going about their business without recourse to christianity. They got instead new flavours of irrationality and hysteria, the emergence of Islam thanks to demographic change, the blossoming of cults, et cetera.
When it comes to religion, it's a strictly pick your poison game. And I've got to say of all the many out there, Christianity is far superior to most other alternatives. That much, I think, is obvious from all of the change currently going on
Are you planning on using science to prove the existence of things that are entirely fictional? Because that's just not how it works. That is why humans need religion. Men cannot be trusted to act in the interests of the collective. That is why they need to be shepherded. And the man who controls God, controls man.
I think the model is something like increased wealth from industrialization -> secularism & modernity. (I think that Scott has made this argument more explicitly elsewhere.)
Actually looking at the history of secularization in the West in detail makes it seem much more contingent. France secularized in the mid 1700s, at least 100 years before the rest of Europe and well before France industrialized. Much of the rest of Europe secularized in the late 1800s or early 1900s. The US has had waves of secularization interspersed with Great Awakenings.
I’m perpetually baffled by complaints like the ones Scott is expressing on behalf of fin de siecle art/architecture/society. For one, just google “rococo molding” and you’ll find suppliers of the most ornate, opulent, maximalist millwork you can install in your very own home! You can also find both vintage and newly manufactured art nouveau fixtures to live in your own little Viennese retreat.
And if your complaint is more about the buildings you see on the streets, get together with some friends, buy some land, and build a lovely little 3-story with a decorative facade.
Markets—the great obsession of libertarianism—decreed the architecture we enjoy now, but as a consequence of rising living standards. Stone work is now highly skilled labor and is hideously expensive. This is a result of cheaper materials obsoletising many stone masons and labor being generally more expensive than it used to be.
Nothing old (with some very rare exceptions) is gone, it’s just gotten more expensive. You can still have that old world, it’s just likely not where you are.
I don't think I can ever buy the notion that aesthetics is anything but purely subjective taste. That may be the YIMBY in me when NIMBYs oppose perfectly fine buildings on aesthetic grounds which ultimately leads to homeless people 20 years down the road leaving litter all over the park, despite the fact that nobody has more time to put garbage into a trash can than a person with absolutely nothing else to do.
You're tracing homelessness to the wrong root. A lot of it is malicious linguistics: people say "homeless" to make it sound like a housing problem, when it's not and never was. They say that to avoid talking about the real problems, which are almost invariably 1) drugs, 2) mental illness, or 3) drugs *and* mental illness.
Building more housing won't fix that. What fixes it is going after the root causes of drug abuse and mental illness.
housing is very expensive and people do in fact get priced out of it
Yes. And then they can move somewhere where it's less expensive, or stay with friends and family while they get back on their feet. People have resources and social networks that can and consistently do help with housing difficulties. So-called "homelessness" is not the result of lacking housing; it's the result of lacking the social capital to help you deal with a lack of housing. And in practice, this only tends to happen due to drugs or untreated mental illness.
<i>I’m perpetually baffled by complaints like the ones Scott is expressing on behalf of fin de siecle art/architecture/society. For one, just google “rococo molding” and you’ll find suppliers of the most ornate, opulent, maximalist millwork you can install in your very own home! You can also find both vintage and newly manufactured art nouveau fixtures to live in your own little Viennese retreat.</i>
That's a bit like saying "I'm perpetually baffled by people complaining about living in a society of drug addicts when they can easily just not do drugs." Yes, personal choice is a thing, but having to endure the stench of weed every time I leave my house is still going to impact my quality of life, even if I myself never touch the stuff.
<i>Markets—the great obsession of libertarianism—decreed the architecture we enjoy now, but as a consequence of rising living standards. Stone work is now highly skilled labor and is hideously expensive. This is a result of cheaper materials obsoletising many stone masons and labor being generally more expensive than it used to be.</i>
(1) It's possible to mass produce architectural decorations. Indeed, people did mass produce them back in the Victorian era, using ceramics or concrete.
(2) Lots of the ugliest modern buildings are hideously expensive both to build and to maintain.
(3) Lots of pretty classical buildings don't actually have loads of fancy decoration.
"Stone work is now highly skilled labor and is hideously expensive. This is a result of cheaper materials obsoletising many stone masons and labor being generally more expensive than it used to be."
This is apparently only technically true. Scott once linked to an article about how you can now get concrete that looks exactly like traditional stonework, and is much cheaper.
There's also the intriguing possibility of AI+robots soon being able to automate stonecutting, doing away with the part that makes it prohibitively expensive.
I think the first 90% already can be.
"I do hope the worst is over"
Seems like a relatively naïve hope, but what do I know?
The then-ascendant Authoritarian/Identitarian strain of the progressive movement fundamentally overplayed its hand in the covid-fueled madness of 2020, and while it momentarily achieved an impressive degree of success in getting mainstream institutions to signal support for its values, that very success has been their undoing as it was enough of a shock for a lot of moderates (who the radicals still rely on to form any kind of effective coalition) to realise, after the dust settled, how crazy things were getting and quietly return to a footing where they're at least capable of being sceptical of the dominant progressive argument (which they mostly seemed to stop being after the 'opposite' shock of Trump's election in 2016).
Identitarian progressives have gained a lot of ground in the past decade, but their offensive has culminated - very few major new institutions have changed course in a direction that favours them in the last 2-3 years, and some (like the elite US universities, which are a bellwether for this kind of thing) have even begun to swing gently back away from it. I do fear that if Trump is re-elected in november that the same panic as before will re-empower the worst elements of the movement.
Doesn't the argument given in your preface already incorporate the substance of your second objection?
The argument 'if you want the cultural values of the 1890s, you should try to build the truly robust Christian culture from which that culture arose' assumes the degeneration you're pointing to- otherwise how will rebuilding a truly robust (Medieval?) Christian culture produce your desired outcome of the 1890s?
Maybe it's not explicitly stated, and maybe Christianists who make the argument are just being shallow or dishonest, but the argument you open with is *only a persuasive argument* if it *assumes* that the process of degeneration will recur, no?
Might be easier to view cultural Christianity as being useful to flatten the curve, as we tried doing with COVID, so not to overwhelm and break the system, while we we're sitting at its table.
> The few sects that escaped decay - ultra-Orthodox Jews, Amish, the Taliban - seem neither clearly scaleable
Why don't they seem scaleable? Islamic caliphates that the Taliban harks back to once spread over relatively large scales.
> At the very least, they suggest one would need a very different kind of Christianity than the West had in 1700s - one as strict, isolationist, and inward-looking as the Amish - to have a fighting chance.
Roughly true, though there is the possibility of a cyclical process whereby you have something like Orthodox Judaism following the progression to Conservative, Reform, and nothing, at which point it gets replaced by a resurgence of Orthodox Judaism to begin the cycle again.
> If modern atheists want a society better than our current one (or rather, better than wherever modern culture is leading us) they'll have to invent some new cultural package that's never been seen before. I don't know what that is, but I prefer to maintain my intellectual integrity while I look for it
It's possible that modern atheists are just never going to find it, just as stable cultural packages of the past weren't invented by modern atheists.
I don't think there's enough land to scale Amish farming practices for 7 billion people. Of course, declining fertility rates may solve that problem.
Apparently the Amish have already shifted into other jobs. "The percentage of Amish families that depend on agriculture as their main source of income is only around 10–15% nationally" https://www.wisbank.com/serving-amish-and-mennonite-communities-in-rural-wisconsin/ Lancaster County PA is the largest Amish settlement in the world, and there only a third are farmers. https://www.npr.org/2019/09/17/755906226/as-amish-leave-farming-for-other-work-some-leave-their-homestead
I say no to the idea of Cultural Christianity, Cultural Judaism, or Cultural Islam. We don’t need to replace Wokeness with anything. Just get rid of it and move on. If something like Wokeness emerges, don’t let it become dominant. Are we not intelligent beings?
“Cultural Christianity” makes total sense… if you completely disregard the contributions to modern civilization made by the Greeks and preserved and refined by Muslims while “Christian Europe” decayed during the dark ages. It wasn’t until explorers went to the universities and libraries of Baghdad and bought the works of Plato and Aristotle back to Europe that significant cultural change occurred. St. Augustine was smart enough to understand the value of these ideas and crammed them in to the version of Christianity that people think of as the foundation of liberalism. It’s not - it’s just Greek philosophy filtered through Islamic scholars and fused with Christianity.
Ayan Hirsi Ali was scarred by effed up people who took the Quran seriously. Everyone who takes religion seriously is usually effed up - it doesn’t matter if those people are Muslim or Christian Evangelicals or Catholics or Orthodox Jews or Amish or Son of Sam or Trump Supporters. But Ali isn’t great at nuance and couldn’t acknowledge this fact.
To be fair, I’m sure it was difficult to do once she fell in with the Sam Harris/Douglas Murray/Bill Maher crowd who lauded her for her “brave anti-Islam stance” because it reinforced their own beliefs.
Christian scholars did not get Greek texts from Baghdad. They got them from Constantinople.
That is correct. The story about the disappearance of Greek and Greek culture that Americans are sold is one of the odd things about the schools.
Well, Greek culture did disappear off the face of written history once, but it's probably not the one most people are taught.
If you're referring to the Greek Dark Age, that's not accurate - they had no presence in written history beforehand. (They do have tangential mentions in Egyptian and Anatolian records, but nothing at the level of, say, specifying where they live.)
The Greek Dark Ages were named that because they had writing prior (Linear B) and lost it before adapting the Phoenician alphabet.
I know that. Nobody claims that they had history, though. The typical Linear B text is supposed to be an inventory list.
It's because of an deep culturally hatred towards non-Papist Christians hence our hatred of Russia to. Better a enlightened Muhammad save Western society than than an obnoxious non-Roman patriarch who refused to play second fiddle to his nominal peer
I suspect because Constantinople was clearly Roman so the whole Islam preserved western ideas is can’t really be pushed there.
It really depends on the nature of the contributions to western civilization that you are concerned with. If you mean technological and scientific contributions, then Christianity had much less to do with that. In fact, it was often in the way( the most memorable example of this is of course Galileo's inquisition with the church even though the church was much less antagonistic than popularly taught). Were many of the scientists who led the scientific revolution such as Newton religious? Sure, but their religion was incidental to the science.
But if you mean sociopolitical, economic, and legal contributions, the history of the West would look very different and a lot worse without Christianity. It is Christianity which outlawed polygamy thereby preventing the kinds of family formation that obtain elsewhere which encourage nepotism and lower parental investment.
It is Christianity with its emphasis on the equality of all before God, an idea that survives most memorably in the American constitution. The greeks did not believe in the equality of all.
It is Christianity, protestantism in particular, which encouraged high literacy rates and extolled the virtues of hard work as a way to distinguish yourself as one of the chosen, an effect Max Weber famously noticed.
It is Christianity with its give unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and unti God that which is God's ideal that contributed to the separation of church and state, a distinction that did not exist elsewhere in the world at the time.
It is Christianity with its practice of extensive donations to the church and the poor that sowed the seeds for the modern welfare state. It's not a coincidence it happens first in extremely protestant Prussia.
And finally, it is Christianity with its new testament ideals and its linear narrative of history with the promise of an eternal paradise that has gone on to inspire countless works of western art, literature, philosophies, and ideologies.
The West has a lot to thank this uniquely strange religion for. It forgets that to its own peril.
This was quite amusing. Thanks!
Galileo's trial for heresy occured after the Pilgrims celebrated the first Thanksgiving. Yet that's the only example than anyone ever gives of the Church's suppression of scientific inquiry.
Well, if you are looking for plenty of anti scientific things the church either did or was done in the name of Christianity, there are the recurring witch-hunts and the very last one was in the nineteenth century in Prussia, less than 200 years ago.
It is true that the church was much less antagonistic to scientific inquiry than commonly taught though and the pattern of interference seems to be strongest when it came to cosmology and astronomy( Giordano Bruno for instance was burned at the stake when he refused to recant and Galileo's strides in the discipline certainly didn't win him many friends). This makes strategic sense for the church because those ideas directly challenge biblical notions of God and Heaven. They were much less concerned with scientific work in biology or natural physics for instance until evolution of course.
It's also interesting that by the medieval era, Christianity had been fused with Aristotelianism and so it's difficult to say how much of the church's reaction was due to scientific contradictions of Aristotle rather than the bible strictly per se.
However, religious devotion and scientific inquiry generally do not mix well. Christianity is fully guilty of this and so interestingly enough is wokeness which has weaponized pseudo science to its own benefit. A religion will always make honest evidence based inquiry a secondary concern because it has to. Its edicts must always come first.
You're equating witch-hunts with restrictions on scientific inquiry? Is it your understanding that Prussian witches were lady scientists, with covens full of Marie Cuties doing important work to discover the properties of the atom? Do you think the Church was restricting anyone doing actual science 200 years ago? If the Church had been looking to restrict science 200 years ago, they should have focused on Michael Faraday, James Watt, and Joseph Henry, not on a bunch of lesbians chanting in the woods.
I don't think it's hard to comprehend how in an environment full of witch-hunts, honest scientific inquiry might be harder to come by. The opportunity cost of such a rigid hysteria is obvious after a few moments of consideration, unless you believe witches and covens actually exist, in which case the argument ceases to be logical.
Also, the church did obstruct scientific inquiry. They banned several books, they were and in many ways still are unfriendly to Darwin's theory of evolution, and they clearly were no friends of the Enlightenment, although by that time the power of the church as an ideological hegemony was mostly spent.
" If the church wanted to go after scientific inquiry, they should have gone after Faraday, ..." That was already the later half of the nineteenth century. That's like saying because Soviet Union did little to counter the spread of capitalism in the 1980s, they were aligned with it. They were already, by that time, well past their peak.
I'm not sure what you think the Enlightenment has to do with science. The Scientific Revolution of the late-Renaissance preceded the Enlightenment, and by some accounts concluded at the outset of the Enlightenment, which was a philosophical movement. Of course, the shared atheist and Protestant myth is that everyone was bumbling around in the dark, not doing any Science until along came the Enlightenment Proto-Dawkinses came in and showed everyone that God was fake and chemistry was real.
Most of Faraday's important work took place in the first half of the 19th century, right around the time of the witch hunts that you say demonstrate that that Christianity was anti-science.
Giordano Bruno was a mystic, not a scientist.
<i>It's also interesting that by the medieval era, Christianity had been fused with Aristotelianism</i>
No, the idea that medieval people were slavishly devoted to Aristotle is a myth spread by early modern polemicists. It's like the 17th-century equivalent of "I'm a bold truth-teller, people who disagree with me are normie sheeple who unthinkingly swallow the party line".
Saint Augustine was around long before Islam.
I think that kind of implies that Christianity and Islam developed in a vaccum and then later encountered Greek philosophy? Or at least they initially had no Greek influence and then later were influenced by it. But Christianity is a product of the Greco-Roman world. Greeks were likely amongst the very first Christians(Saints Luke and Timothy come to mind) and within a decade or two of its founding, I reckon most Christians were Greeks. Christianity is one of the heirs of the ancient Greek world(And Islam developed from some variations and mixtures of Christianity and Judaism(and thus so was also an heir of the Greeks from its birth). In my view, the West is the heir to Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome, all influenced by and influencing each other.
It depends on definitions. There’s a distinction between religion, philosophy, jurisprudence and culture though they’re all inter-related.
Among other errors: St.. Thomas Aquinas, not St. Augustine.
Thanks. My memory has been lousy since I got sick. What are the other errors?
I'd say the religion does matter quite a lot in *how* effed up one can be. Ayaan may focus on Islam for personal reasons, but it is a uniquely problematic set of religious beliefs in the modern age - there are no-to-minimal suicide bombings, for example, without a fervent belief in martyrdom, which is not present in all religions. There are other problematic differences, but Harris has done this topic to death, and you're aware of him, so I won't go on.
I think that’s an overly simplistic narrative.
Why do you think that Islam has especially “fervent beliefs about martyrdom” compared to other religions - including one that is *literally symbolized* by a device that was used to kill someone for their religious beliefs?
Is it because you subconsciously associate a Christian “martyr” as someone who is unjustly persecuted for practicing religion while associating a Muslim “martyr” as someone who is willing to die for their beliefs *by harming others*? Why the distinction? Especially since the Greek term *martyr* and the Arabic term *Shahid* both translate to something like “witness” or “testimony”?
Islam is close to 1,500 years old. Were suicide bombings (or the equivalent) a hallmark of Muslims throughout that time? Why not?
Japanese *Kamikaze* pilots notably used suicide attacks during World War II. Were they inspired by Islamic teachings? Does Shintoism also have “especially fervid beliefs about martyrdom” that explains why Japanese pilots preferred that mode of attack while American Christian pilots preferred killing their enemies with nuclear weapons?
Could it be possible that “Islam has fervent beliefs about martyrdom” is just a convenient retcon some dude named Altman came up with to explain why suicide bombing is more commonly used by aggrieved Muslims than other aggrieved populations? Could there be other non-religious based explanations to explain this correlation?
I also just reject that Christianity was anything other than incidental to classical liberalism. People tend to equate Christianity with the founding of america, even though the pilgrims were probably less important than the capitalists, and the actual philosophers/writers of the time were mostly skeptical of Christianity.
> the pilgrims were probably less important than the capitalists
And where did capitalism come from? It was invented by Adam Smith, who for all that people these days like to call him a great economist, was a *moralist* first and foremost. He wrote _The Theory of Moral Sentiments_ as an exploration of Christian morality, and _The Wealth of Nations,_ in which he defined capitalism, was a follow-up to it. It is largely concerned with how to have a prosperous market economy that operates in a morally virtuous manner, and how to avoid all of the horrible things libertarians love to do with what they call "capitalism" that brings the word into so much disrepute these days.
Without Christianity, there is no capitalism; the closest you'd get is rapacious corporatism.
Excellent point!
I didn't mean capitalism as an economic (or certainly moral) theory, but sure. I meant people who crossed the sea for economic reasons.
Maybe go read The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism before proffering your rejection…
Personally, I think Weber has it exactly 180 degrees wrong there. People in charge will invent a religion that says they're good people if their old one doesn't.
You can proffer whatever opinion you like; in fact capitalism started only in Protestant states, then spread from there.
So it’s not a law of nature, obviously, and no one can prove all counterfactuals. But unlike you, he’s got facts on his side, where you have only speculation.
P.S. I happen to agree with your second sentence. But it’s an almost entirely different subject then your original assertion about Christianity being incidental to the rise of classical liberalism.
If it was incidental, then where was the classical liberalism of non-Christian cultures? I would go further and say that classical liberalism was also absent from, for example, Orthodox Christianity.
I'm not sure I agree - I think you and I might be using "classical liberalism" differently - but I would be very interested in reading more about this, if you'd care to expand on it?
It would be a better argument if we meant something a bit more specific here. There are and have been lots of Christian cultures (missionaries do that), but we typically only refer to one time period in a couple places as classically liberal. Why haven't any nascent Christian cultures developed on to classical liberalism in Africa or Asia?
Similar to how Orthodox Christianity didn't develop classical liberalism: Christianity by itself is not sufficient.
If "Christianity collapsed into wokeness and postmodernism", it's because wokeness and postmodernism are broken forms of Christian belief in disguise. "The last shall be first", "saints and sinners", the apocalypse -- all easily map to wokeness, which forms the appeal for people who grew up in Christian culture without the religious/ritual pieces. The "Cultural Christian" argument is to embrace the ritual parts (Bible stories, baptism, forgiveness, funerals that talk about heaven and hell). You don't have to "believe" these rituals any more than "Cultural Jewish" believes in circumcision or bar mitzvahs. Wokeness will collapse too unless it recognizes this.
The issue with wokeness is it doesn’t believe in loving your enemy
So what’s the best way in the medium term to transmit Judeo-Christian values to the masses?
Because in practice, that’s what we’re talking about, right?
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and all that.
Your logic seems to miss a step - even if what you assert is true - that Christianity begets liberalism begets doom - if nothing else, you left out of the analysis that the sooner Judeo-Christian values decay, the sooner the badness occurs.
IMO you are letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. I.e. your argument is that since Culture Christianity is imperfect, why support it at all?
Churchill had the answer to the question: Democracy is the worst form of government ever invented…
Cultural Christianity is also not necessarily useful. If you really do think that the societies built on Christianity were preferable and that Christianity was a necessary component to their continuation, you should wish there to be authentic Christians in society to rehabilitate these cultures, rather than erzatz cultural Christians who were not the key component in these societies’ successes and failures to begin with.
Just as there are secular Jews today, there could be or already are secular Christians (who respect and admire the essential aspects of Christian spirituality and ethics but are not devoted religious individuals). This is a good contribution to modern and liberal Western civilization. But this is something peripheral to your central point.
A "secular Jew" is a member of the Jewish ethnic group, so there's the level of cultural cohesion that continues to exist even when the religion is removed. Christianity doesn't work that way.
The closest Christianity can come to this is to tie certain aspects of Christianity to ethnic identity, e.g. the Italian tradition of the Seven Fishes dinner on Christmas Eve. In other words, if you're italian, you do this Christian thing even if you don't believe in Christianity.
Yes. https://open.substack.com/pub/toonsday/p/hey-zeus
Nietzsche also argued in the Geneology of Morals that Christianity has undermined the concepts of traditional good and evil, leaving us with a slave morality that has persisted for hundreds of years (e.g. slavery bad, equality is good, etc. ). If Nietzsche is right then I think it is very hard for western atheists to escape from being a 'cultural christian'. This is the core criticism I think: if you are rejecting Christianity but not the morality then you are still a Cultural Christian. Repackaging Christian beliefs as rational precepts doesn't feel very authentic. And those do really escape find themselves in uncomfortable places in doing so. (e.g. Overman, Will to power, etc.)
And what of Quakerism ?
A long list of "firsts" in morality, but very thin on theology & hierarchy. Rather adherence to a set of practices (an hour of silent prayer unless one feels lead to share a message, acting only in unity, etc).
Not much for the decorative arts though
Moral revelation "firsts"
Beginning - Men, women and all people are equal
1690s - Prison should be to reform and not punish
1730s to 1770s - Slavery is a moral outrage
WW 1 - Strangers starving far away should be feed
1962 - Gay marriage is as acceptable as straight marriage
Weird that anyone still believes in prison as reform.
I haven't been able to find anything corresponding to that 1962 date, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quakers#Marriage instead provides an incident from 1986.
I was told that our British Friends published a book "Quakers and Sex" in 1962 or 1963 (approved) with the quote "The genders of a couple in a loving committed couple make no moral distinction".
See Scandinavian prisons.
https://inquisitivebird.xyz/p/the-myth-of-the-nordic-rehabilitative
Thank you, this is excellent (and makes one absolutely furious at the professional reporters who stoked the myth, not for the first or last time).
It would seem that Quakers are directly responsible for the decay of Christianity.
I'm pro-religion in the sense that I think the world would be better if more people were religious. I'm also pro-science, and think we can have religion without the supernatural. I don't think we need "cultural Christianity" specifically, but I claim that a functional society needs cultural religions to teach useful values and help people figure out how to live well.
I believe we need religion because adult developmental psychology suggests we do. For those not familiar, the basic idea is that psychological developmental stages aren't just for kids, but also for adults. Kegan's model is probably the most popular, but Cook-Greuter's is better. I'll use Kegan's to make my case since more people know it.
Kegan's model contains 5 levels. I'll skip 1 and describe the rest (with some help from Claude):
2. Imperial Mind (childhood to adolescence): People at this stage develop a sense of self separate from others. They focus primarily on their own needs and interests, struggling to fully consider others' perspectives. They understand rules mainly in terms of personal consequences rather than social contracts. Relationships are viewed in terms of personal benefit. They can delay gratification for short-term goals but struggle with long-term planning. Self-regulation is developing but still limited.
3. Socialized Mind (adolescence to adulthood): People at this stage operate within shared social values and expectations. They derive their sense of self largely from relationships and social roles. They rely heavily on the beliefs of others to understand the world, especially those of authority figures. They struggle with conflicting expectations between different social groups and have difficulty critically analyzing social norms.
4. Self-Authoring Mind (some adults): People at this stage develop their own internal authority and value system. They can critically examine societal expectations and create their own ethical framework. They mediate between different values and construct personal solutions to complex problems. They take responsibility for their choices and pursue long-term goals despite social pressures. While they consider others' perspectives, their sense of self isn't dependent on others' approval.
5. Self-Transforming Mind (rare in adults): People at this stage recognize the limitations of their own ideology and identity. They can simultaneously hold multiple, even contradictory, systems of meaning without needing to reconcile them. They have a fluid, continually evolving sense of self. They engage with and learn from radically different perspectives, recognizing the interconnectedness of all systems. They navigate complexity with ease and have a meta-awareness of the process of meaning-making itself.
If this is your first time hearing about Kegan, a few things probably jump out to you, like that some adult-aged people fail to fully make the transition from 2 to 3. What you might also notice, which David Chapman of meaningness.com has explored extensively, is that the modern world asks people to operate at least at stage 4 and ideally at stage 5, but also contains few structures for supporting people at stage 3. Chapman calls this the "meaningness crisis", and he's worked hard to produce content to help people make the transition from 4 to 5.
I'm personally a bit more interested in all those people we've abandoned at stage 3. This is traditionally the role religion fills. But modernism chased people away from religion. Political parties have stepped in the fill the void, but they do the same job worse because they exist to gain power, and only support people to the extent it helps the party gain power.
Religions on the surface don't seem much better. But religions don't exist for a single purpose like political parties do (in the sense that religions don't go away if you pull out any one of the things they are about, but political parties dissolve immediately if they are not an effective path to power). This gives them the excellent quality of not being incentivized to optimize for any one thing to the exclusion of other things. And in that optimization slack, they have taken up the purpose of helping people live their lives well. Sometimes they do this for theoretical reasons, like wanting to bring people close to God, but they also do it for practical reasons, like it's better to live surrounded by people who are better to get along with.
Now, I want to be clear, I'm not here to say all religions are equally good at the thing I care about, which is supporting people at stage 3, and ideally also supporting them in their transition to 4 and 5. But if you go back and look at what people at stage 3 need and you look at what a religion like Christianity offers, you'll discover a lot of overlap.
If I've convinced you, what should we do? I think you should find and join a religion that doesn't care what you believe. Christianity and Islam and unusually focused on belief, whereas most religions care more about actions. This makes them both have weird failure modes, and one of those is scaring away people who get to stage 4 and realize there's no God as he has been literally described by religious authorities. That's how we got where we are today with modernism driving people away from religion.
I decided to adopt Zen Buddhism. Other people I know who consider themselves rationalists and don't believe in invisible dragons have become Quakers or Unitarians or started practicing Buddhisms other than Zen. I can't say it's all easy: lots of people have religious trauma that makes it hard for them to connect with religion. But it's my belief that religions fill a common psychological need that most people have, especially when they are at stage 3, and the lack of something to fill that need causes societal disfunction.
But why do we want people to get to stage 4 and 5 in the first place? Such people are dangerous. Any values that they develop on their own have a very high chance to conflict with the interests of the collective. Like a cancer eating away at the body. It's better to simply keep most of the population under control, no?
My assumption is that people being more whole is better than them being less whole. The idea that society should be constituted mostly of people who are less whole than they could be is morally and spiritually objectionable, whatever the practicalities of the matter may be.
(one reply to this would be to assert that most people will never get to stage 4 or 5 anyway, so any such measures would make a direct difference to the experience of only a minority of people, even if they thereby succeed in maintaining society for all others. )
From a stage 3 perspective, we don't. But people are going to bust through stage 3 anyway.
The bigger issue is that today we have a society designed only for stages 4 and 5. That's what modernism and postmodernism are about. But by not providing real options to support people at stage 3, they end up trapped in various weird stages of development.
Some people stay stuck at stage 2 because they lack the structure they need to get to stage 3. Some of them manage to get to stage 3 only with the help of our remaining stage 3 organizations, like the military.
Other people get stuck in a weird version of stage 3 that is based on a compression of modernism or postmodernism into stage 3 terms. This is what happens to, for example, the people who "believe in science" as if it were a religion or make a political party or company they work for (a structure you can only maybe navigate without it taking advantage of you at stage 5) their replacement religion.
There's much we could say about the modern world and why it structurally tries to force people out of stage 3 whether they're ready for that or not. David Chapman has written on this extensively, and I recommend reading his writing on this rather than mine. A good starting point is: https://meaningness.com/systematic-mode
Yes. Frankly, stage 4 and 5 remind me of people with Narcissistic Personality Disorder that I used to know. Or in one case, someone who could easily have become a cult leader but decided to do something more productive with their life.
I'd talk about "modernity" rather than "modernism", which is an artistic movement.
Modernity has a few ideologies, mainly: liberalism, socialism, fascism.
Maybe the only "coherent" way out of modernity is if science fully decodes the human brain and the human consciousness (and its interplay with human DNA), opening the door to the cyborg.
A transcendent overcoming of modernity rather than literal reactionary conservatism.
This is standard Yuval Harari, and I think he's right on this.
A little piece of evidence: so many of contemporary social changes are consequence of the contraceptive pill.
Somebody has probably already pointed this out, but the New Testament explicitly points out that if Christianity is bogus then Christian’s are the lamest folks fit to be pitied only.
But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen: And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that he raised up Christ: whom he raised not up, if so be that the dead rise not. For if the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised: And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins. Then they also which are fallen asleep
in Christ are perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.
Not exactly a ringing endorsement of cultural Christianity…
Besides the arguments in this post, I don't see why we should assume the ways you describe some past societies were better had anything to do with their being more religious (or closer to a more religious past). I see wokeness and excessive slave morality as orthogonal to Christianity at best, if not in some cases mildly supported by its ethics; past societies were unwoke and less slave moralist despite Christianity, not because of it.
To me, Christian ethics and thus "cultural Christianity" is unappealing in the first place, from the easy targets like treating victimless sexual activities as sins, to the whole "turn your other cheek" ethic.
50 percent of a society is below median -- by any metric you choose. Ergo, somebody has to be better than median to offset those below. Democratic government cannot provide this -- by definition.
There needs to be organizations which strive to be better than median, without expectation that everyone meets those standards. Christianity began as such an organization. Christians were to be "salt of the earth" and to get through a "narrow gate."
But then the Church tried to shove everyone through that narrow gate. This led to both really ugly forcible conversions and watering down of Christian standards.
The restoration of religious freedom is in many respects a return to original Christianity. But, alas, the urge to get everyone through to door has led many a denomination to dumb down Christianity. We are experiencing the results...
This seems to imply that you can't shift the median itself. Part of the point of Christianity is to make everyone behave better. Sure, they'll be a distribution of how well behaved people are, but raising the median benefits everyone.
No. It implies that the shifting needs to be done by people and organizations which represent something above the median.
As a Christian, in my circles "cultural Christians" is a well-known term and not a positive one: we don't really want more of them. The idea that when Christianity is the dominant culture there's a ton of people who are "Christian" by default without really having any serious commitment to the faith.
From a Christian perspective, there are certainly downsides to Christianity's loss of cultural centrality, but the falling off of "cultural christians" is, I think, often viewed as a good thing. It's better, in a lot of ways, to have a smaller-on-paper religion consisting just of the more serious members than to have a huge religion where a huge chunk of the "adherents" only show up on Christmas and Easter and don't think about it all on the other 363.24 days of the year.
This "smaller but more committed" faith is both the original form of the faith - there weren't many "Chreasters" when Christianity was an illegal, underground faith in Rome - and it's also a form that has been seen in modern times in places that have been hostile to the faith, like China where it's shown to be strain of the religion that's pretty resistant to eradication.
If things keep going the way they're going culturally (and they might, and they might not, and as Dan Carlin would say, either way is interesting), this is where I see Christianity going in the West - not extinct but not a dominant force in the culture, either. And I don't think it's only 'extreme' versions that will survive - I think there's going to continue to be mainline Catholics and mainline Protestants, just in smaller numbers.
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If there's a point to the 'cultural christianity' argument, I think it's just that it'd be nice if people did appreciate the extent to which modern 'liberal' values have largely come from Christianity - this is the point that historian Tom Holland (not that Tom Holland) makes in Dominion (not the animal-welfare "Dominion" book that was in the book review contest) - not that I want people to be 'cultural Christian' but it's a good antidote to the frankly revisionist histories going around about how all the church ever did was oppress people, burn witches, murder scientists, and start wars.
Wouldn’t you want as many people at least exposed as possible? Some cultural Christians might have become the real thing with enough nudging
It's tricky - on the one hand, yeah, what you say can happen - someone can be a cultural Christian, then go through some (often difficult) life-experience and end up getting serious.
... but I'd say the far more common outcome is that cultural Christianity often "inoculates" people against a more serious strain of Christianity - people are exposed to weak and distorted strains of Christianity and it makes them non-receptive to stronger strains. "Moral therapeutic deism" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moralistic_therapeutic_deism) is a great description of what that sort of 'inoculation' dose of Christianity looks like.
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But like I said, it's tricky - at the end of the day is it better to have a religion consisting of a million nominal believers of which 20% are serious or one consisting of a hundred thousand people, of which 100% are serious? The first has double the number of serious believers, but the second is probably a lot more Effective. (But of course, ultimately, it's not our call to make)
I was scrolling down looking for this perspective from somebody who actually believes in Christianity. In the Book of Revelation, Jesus says to one of the churches:
"I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth."
It sure sounds from this quote like Jesus would be happier with a society divided between serious Christians, and committed nonbelievers (especially if the latter are genuinely trying to follow the truth); rather than a society full of lots of nominal Christians who show up every week because that is the socially respectable thing to do.
It's true there are some real benefits from more people being exposed to Christian ideas in a "Christian" culture. But, real examples of such cultures are inevitably still heavily influenced by worldliness and avarice, traits that are quite incompatible with genuine Christian ethics. In a Christian flavored culture, the fact that Christianity is socially "approved", and therefore accepted by the rich and famous, may actually make it more difficult to acquire an authentic spirituality. In some ways it is harder to follow the "narrow way" marked out by the gospel, when the broad road is also labelled as "Christianity"!
As you say, there are some advantages on both sides. But, if the choice ever comes down to a society in which Christians are persecuted, or a society in which Christians do the persecuting---while I'd rather have neither!---it seems obviously more in accordance with the spirit of Christ's teaching to pick being persecuted. There are lots of supposed Christians out there talking online about how they definitely would use the Ring of Power to dominate the bad guys, if they ever got it. Fortunately, they aren't very likely to get it. (For example, it is always amusing to see online integralists debating whether they *should* turn America into an officially Catholic society, as if that were on option on the table. But, lots of Protestant evangelical forms of this as well.)
Exposure in cultural Christianity is often a perversion of Christian beliefs, e.g. Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, or blue laws.
I often think about an episode of the sitcom "Step By Step" from the early 90s where the dad doesn't want to go to church because he'd rather watch football (The Simpsons had an episode around the same time in a similar vein). Eventually he reluctantly attends church but sneaks off to the attic to watch, ending with him crashing through the ceiling in the middle of the sermon. That seems representative of cultural Christianity in the 90s. We can draw a line directly from that to where we are today.
The past is a foreign country and they don’t allow immigration
They're powerless to stop theft and appropriation though.
But if the future doesn't grant us asylum, we're constantly in a state of illegal alienation.
I definitely think people are free riding on the religiosity of others. Perhaps it would help if we framed it with the Chinese Confucian concept of Li. Ritual, etiquette, propriety are loose translations for a concept that reminds me of "manners on steroids". Society has a bunch of arcane rules and procedures, from TSA to job interviews to therapy reports to (in some places) addressing adults in a particular way. Perhaps you don't know why these rules exist. But as a good Confucian, you accept them and try to tie your soul to them for they are part of li. In order to play your role, you need li. What li does for society, according to Xunzi, is that it ensures a harmony of action among all parties. It is the set of ritual actions and expectations for behavior that makes society lower cost to navigate, because the decision has been made for you.
In the western context, we might call it piety: best personified by Aeneas fleeing Troy with his father and household gods on his back, and son in his hand. There may exist a set of beliefs and attitudes and rituals which makes society tick and preserve its culture. Piety is a real thing like justice. A type of honor paid to the values of a society, rather than cynicism or hypercritical readings.
Christian culture cannot be replaced by beloved 1890s progressive irreligious culture, because that era, much as I love it, does not provide a full set of answers for how to live. It is not a practice of a community. Sure there was Bloomsbury, but it was low fertility. If their number John Maynard Keynes echoed the same view you dislike, "We had the best of both worlds. We destroyed Christianity and yet had its benefits." Maybe he was being hyperbolic, but there is something to it.
I think that that something is this. Christian religons provide a framework and in practice many, many details for how to live life well and virtuously. In the streets Christianity can be liberal, but rarely in the sheets. There it is particular. For while the very intelligent and wealthy recover from vice pretty easily -they snap out of addictions, an extramarital affair won't leave them destitute, and alcoholism tends to be functional - for normal people, for children, and for those lacking in natural and secular advantages, Christian religion provides a thicker moral safety net to pull them out of self-destructive tendencies. It provides li.
All major religions probably also serve a function like this, and so you have to judge which network of li obligations you like best or lead to the best results. But if most people are shedding the old rituals and NOT replacing them with new useful or beautiful manners, then you might look at the live options available and shout, "Christianity!"
That's the value of being culturally Christian. You accept some amount of Christian li, and in exchange you get the benefits of the li being taught to the next generation. It is possible to assess Christian cultural norms, decide they are really good, and promote them without yourself subscribing the Nicene Creed. That's not hypocritical! But someone has to run the institutions which teach and instantiate those values.
I like this framing, thank you!
Shouldn't you point out one aspect of culture that a) pre-christian b) desirable
I'm of the opinion humanity is growing layers of mental complexity culturally(cave man art sux, children seem to need to watch adults talking to learn complex grammer, accounts of extreme neglect/raised by animals children reporting different animalistic mental states as adults)
I've heard claims that Christianity spread the idea time in linear and that ideal forms can physically exist; these are fairly important claims for the modern world that as far as I know no one modern credibly disagrees. I'm fairly unclear what it's like to talk to a uncontacted tribes that hasn't yet made a full number system, but isn't such concept propagation obviously true(assuming evolution) even if hard to empathize with. I will never know what it's like to not have been exposed to the concept of zero since being new born, but entire ancient writing systems didn't have such a concept nailed down to say nothing of uncontacted tribes with "1,2,many" numbers
Who says you have to assert Christian doctrine? I openly say I do not believe it, but that I am "pro-Christian" and I miss many things about it.
I recognize it's part of western identity and history, I acknowledge the value of it, and I do not go around asserting that (say) Islam is just as good or better because it's foreign. I don't try to deconvert Christians and I support the priviledged display of Christian symbols and traditions in the west, rather than the notion that all religions are of equal cultural and historical significance here.
I don't think cultural Christianity can dissolve into Woke because it isn't a real religion. Maybe it needs a nucleus of real Christians to operate (and one day that will run out), and maybe it just buys time.
But maybe buying time is important.
You use such an ill-defined and ahistorical
grab bag of a notion to denote modernity/ modernism, while at the same time purporting to link it to a specific time (how about place - Germany, UK, France, Russia, the US??), that there is no hope for deriving any meaningful analysis from these premises.
An allegory: In a certain village, the people gathered fish bones and mingled them with their soil, believing this would summon the spirits of the fish to bless their crops. For many years, their fields flourished more abundantly than any in the land. With this prosperity, the villagers found more time for contemplation, and in their contemplation, they slowly ceased to believe in the fish spirits. Eventually, they discontinued their ancient practice of enriching the soil with fish bones. For a time, the earth remained fertile, yielding bountiful harvests. Yet, as seasons passed, the land grew weary and barren. The wise elders among them counseled a return to the old ways, hoping to revive the tired soil. But a certain scribe, renowned among the people, persuaded them otherwise, arguing that it was this very practice of bone mixing that had brought them to their current plight. The villagers, swayed by his words, diligently tried other methods while the land continued to languish.
He who hath ears to hear, let him hear! I also disagree Scott’s implicit claim that Christianity inevitably “led” to our current state of affairs and therefore cannot be the needed solution.
They should have gotten some bonemeal at Costco.
I'm not sure whether you're being glib here, but I'll take this idea and run with it: The problem is that performing the motions and clinging to superstition stunts your growth. Mixing in fish bones is *the right action*, sure, but the lack of understanding is what led to their downfall, and clinging to the myth of fish spirits prevents them from seeing other ways their goal can be achieved, like using fertiliser.
That would require an understanding of the scientific method, and by that point you've gone past blind superstition.
And the modern equivalent would require a common understanding of "flourishing", which I highly doubt is possible. (I think it's possible to have a common understanding of withering though.)
Great points—I didn’t intend the allegory to suggest that Ye Olde Christendom was the optimal society or that superstition is desirable. It was specifically meant to critique Scott’s claim that because we "already tried Christian culture," which purportedly eventually led to today’s problems, it isn’t a viable set of practices to reconsider. Perhaps other factors and forces, which we didn’t understand at the time, contributed to cultural decline rather than the culture itself. Now, we see that we are missing something that we didn’t appreciate before. Not returning to it because of the claim that somehow “caused” today’s problems seems silly to me.
One issue I have with this analogy is that I don’t think Christendom was a better place to live than anywhere else for most of its history. It wasn’t until the Reformation-era wars subsided and secularism was arrived at as a compromise that the West starts to show signs of pulling ahead. And in particular, I think post-Enlightenment West was much better than the pre-Enlightenment West. But secularism and the Enlightenment are *precisely* what set us on the road to modern, irreligious society.
So the society that *may* be worth going back to (post-Enlightenment Christianity) has never shown itself to be a stable state
The West already had the highest GDP per capita by 1400 or so, a good century before the Reformation; and of course, it was on the cusp of the Age of Exploration (conventionally dated to 1415), which directly led to its becoming dominant over the rest of the world. It wasn't yet as decisively far ahead as it would later become, but it certainly was showing signs of pulling ahead.
Interesting - I didn't know this about GDP but Wikipedia seems to corroborate it, more or less. Let me amend "starts to show signs of pulling ahead" to "starts to show signs of developing into a society that *actually* adheres to the values that I want to uphold - liberty, freedom of speech, equality, etc."
Basically:
* Pre-enlightenment Christianity was stable but not good compared to modern society
* Enlightenment is when things start to get good, but enlightenment basically sowed the seeds of Christianity's decline
So I don't see any previous version of Christian society that has *both* of the following characteristics:
1. Reason to think it is stable enough to avoid sliding into [whatever it is we don't like about modern secular society]
2. Has superior values to modern society (which for all its faults actually takes liberty, equality, and freedom of speech much more seriously than the vast majority of historical Christian societies)
GDP per capita was higher in Europe than other parts of the world in 1400 because the Bubonic plague had just killed 1/3 of the population and left the survivors with a lot more farmland per capita. Most of Europe then saw a decline in per capita GDP as population recovered.
I always see people making the "cultural Christianity argument" from the opposite direction; in socjus-infested spaces like Tumblr, "cultural Christianity" is infamously a buzzword used by religious non-Christians to suggest that atheists are evil subversive Western crypto-Christians.
If you actually got that old-fashioned culture back, I think you'd realize immediately that modernity is actually a great improvement.
And I'm not just saying that because of the horrific anti-Semitism you'd have to deal with.
For a man who values mentally ill people’s right not to be locked up against their will, to prefer the morality of 1880 over today?
My irony meter goes BOIIIINGGGG
That’s a technological advance, rather than a moral awakening. Chlorpromazine was discovered in the 1950s. Up until then, asylums were the only option.
Honestly, it's a pretty direct line from Plato to Augustine to Descartes to Le Corbusier, all united in their elevation of the abstract and universal over the concrete and the particular. I'd think paganism and Whitman and Nietzsche are closer to whatever cultural threads produced art nouveau, if you wanted to map things this way, and those are the threads I'd be looking to pick up.
But Christianity didn't degrade into woke. It degraded into nihilism which bloomed into woke. Not the same thing.
hasn't the middle east become much more muslim in the past century?
Seth Bullow and I debated this very issue in ninth grade, @1970. His position was that people needed to believe in hell because it was the only way to prevent everybody from killing each other. I said people did not have to be afraid of an ultimate punishment to behave. He was conservative and I was/am reform. I heard that after college he made alyiah and moved to Israel
This argument doesn't make much sense to me. (As a pretty hardcore atheist who doesn't value Cultural Christianity.)
In general, if we predict a movement from X to Y, and we value X, then we should keep promoting X. We should do this _even if our efforts at doing so have not yet offset the inexorable slide toward Y_. If we stopped promoting X, then we would slide toward Y even faster! And maybe, if we just promote X hard enough, we'll rally more and more to our cause, and shift the direction of movement back toward X. One key element of doing that might be creating a new intellectual synthesis, where former Y-partisans recognize the value of X.
This holds whether we take X = Christianity and Y = modernism, or X = conservativism and Y = liberalism ("Cthulhu swims left"), or X = small government and Y = big government, or X = good housing policy and Y = bad housing policy.
> And maybe, if we just promote X hard enough, we'll rally more and more to our cause, and shift the direction of movement back toward X.
But all this does is create a larger and larger potential energy for the eventual slide into Y, right? If we define F as the force by which X is cultivated, and G as the rate at which X degenerates into Y: what is the evidence that F is not completely overwhelmed by G every single time, on a sufficient time scale?
Consider a more creative hypothetical:
All the adults are non-Christian, but all the children are sent to Sunday school. The children are educated, rigorously, while the adults do whatever they want on Sunday morning.
When the children turn eighteen, they are disillusioned, on purpose. No Santa at five, no Christ at eighteen.
A lot of them get blackout drunk for two months straight.
But none of them can shake the work ethic of Calvinism, or the community building of Lutheranism, or the world building drive of Baptism, or the pacifism of the Quakers, or the drive to order and preservation of the Catholics. None of them can upend all the thousand little moral teachings in their hearts, or forget the enormous collection of Christian art.
As adults, they join in a sort of rational agnostic world which is tolerant of many things but quite firm on the dangers of a whole society growing up without these foundations, quite firm in its defense of the child practice, pointing to a society like ours (maybe in their past, maybe in another part of the world) as their evidence. Many of these new adults agree, many bow to pressure, most continue the practice of Sunday Schools, enjoying their own Sunday mornings with a quiet guilt, and WEIRD continues.
Note that many, many things actually do work this way. Consider how anything at all was taught to children in the US or Russia around 1912, or 1952. Wasn't there a significant gap between what the children were taught, and what sophisticated adults privately believed? This gap was, maybe, stable, and then we poked it to death.
This hypothetical is why I, a formerly angry lapsed Catholic agnostic, happily let my in-laws take my daughters to Sunday School. I'm serious, no fooling.
Clara, Alice, if you're reading this ten or twenty years from now, just know that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes,_Virginia,_there_is_a_Santa_Claus
A virtue must be defended on its own merits, and this is something Christians should already know. You don't go to mass on Sunday and "love thy neighbor" falls out of that naturally. You have to practice and drill and refine the principle the other 6 days of the week.
Equally, if you value liberal norms, you have to practice and defend them specifically. If you rely on religion to do it for you without putting any effort into the fight, you'll end up at illiberal religious dark ages. Religion doesn't make you a good person. Ideally it's a catalyst if you focus your efforts on change, but let's not pretend it's a magic pill that makes everything better on its own.
Jesus was a real, historical figure. Moses, Buddha and Mohammad were too.
The reason their stories persist to this day is because each of them became enlightened. They transcended the cares of this world and showed us the way to something beyond.
You can believe in God, or not, but the truth is the truth and it will find you. This applies to humans, societies, nations.
If you have sinned, lay it at the feet of Jesus and you will be forgiven.
He loves us so much that he died for us. He was resurrected, and sits at the right hand of the Father to judge the living and the dead.
I see people who are going to die every day. None of them talk about money. They all talk about love, their family, and God.
We live in biblical times. I pray, by the grace of God, may this world know peace.
Moses very likely wasn't historical - for one thing, the Exodus isn't a historical event, even when stripped of the supernatural bits. Wikipedia:
"The consensus of modern scholars is that the Pentateuch does not give an accurate account of the origins of the Israelites, who appear instead to have formed as an entity in the central highlands of Canaan in the late second millennium BCE (around the time of the Late Bronze Age collapse) from the indigenous Canaanite culture.[1][2][3] Most modern scholars believe that some elements in the story of the Exodus might have some historical basis, but that any such basis has little resemblance to the story told in the Pentateuch."
I've said before that I think this is the crux of rationality as formulated by Yudkowsky: truth-seeking vs. systematized winning. I have yet to see a proof that the two cannot come into conflict. IMO, humans have not had time to evolve to cope with all of the secondary effects of rational thought; what if we are indeed evolved to prefer a set of beliefs which, upon rational consideration, seem to be false? What if flourishing requires selective abandonment of truth?
But practically speaking: why does it need to be a new package? Can't we just say "we tried it this way and everything fell apart, so let's go back to doing it the old way"? Who is to say the degeneration was inevitable, as opposed to the result of contingent forces being applied, which can in turn be unapplied?
Or perhaps as the Buddhists say, we're living in the Latter Days of the Law.
Yeah, I think faith is the belief that what is good and what is true are the same, such that truth seeking will eventually lead to winning.
A house built on strong foundations will stand, but a house built on sand will fall, in other words.
Let’s see what the next chapter brings.
> faith is the belief that what is good and what is true are the same
I like that formulation. It might be slightly undercut by the belief in an afterlife containing individualized desserts, thus ensuring "winning". But then, as I argued elsewhere in the thread, the point isn't to establish earthly paradise by any means necessary, it's to cultivate virtuous souls. And not defined by some purely internal metric, but with deliberate attention to interpersonal interaction.
I think there's a deeply rooted human instinct to turn back the "cultural clock" when society has gone awry, and revert to the old ways. We call it "conservatism". When I'm feeling optimistic, I imagine this instinct will take us back to 20th C. modernism, and give us another chance to do it right & in a way that is sustainable. Maybe soon it will be possible to be both a progressive and a conservative without any cognitive dissonance.
When I'm feeling pessimistic, I think it's all just the "hard times make strong men" thing and we're doomed to bounce back and forth forever.
But if you don't like asserting false things, you should try Buddhism -- not as a philosophy, but as a religion. Some parts of it are hard to accept, such as reincarnation and karma, but they're at least plausible, and not really central aspects of the religion anyway. The other 90% of it is verifiably true, based on your own direct experience, and the system of morality is remarkably similar to the Abrahamic religions (don't kill/lie/steal etc.)
I think the major arguments in favor of swallowing one's principles and going through the motions of Christianity or some other religious system all stem form the fact that without unifying belief systems it's very hard, especially for elites, to identify broadly acceptable mechanisms for signalling that they're part of a larger cross-class group (through the "costly displays" mechanism). Without buy-in, institutions encouraging impersonal pro-sociality weaken, setting off a vicious cycle of institutional degradation. Without social institutions worth controlling the elites just move on to enriching themselves with cash, which in turn enables conspicuous consumption for wealth (rather than belonging) signalling, which further weakens social institutions, hurting the ability of technocratic elites to launder institutional trust into solutions to real problems (vaccines are possibly the most recent prominent example of this sort of failure cascade).
Haven't we unified in the past under the belief system of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" i.e. the American way of life? Or does that signal degrade without the shared sacrifice of war?
The wars probably helped in that regard but it's also worth remembering that the mid-20th century was extremely thick with intermediary institutions, religious institutions were just the most deeply embedded since they served as hubs for multigenerational immigrant communities.
There's not as much social science here as I'd like in order to have confidence in this view, but there is a fairly large literature on social trust, and much of it springs from shared membership (or shared membership within a small degree of removal); i.e. - I may not be a Rotarian (or Catholic, or Jew), but since my friend from my church is part of the same Rotary club that you are and he'd never complained about anyone there, I can implicitly trust you because you are, in a sense, pre-vetted.
So my view here is less a defense of "cultural Christianity" per se than it is an argument for building robust, cross-class intermediary institutions, and religious institutions outlasted the others (with the exception of some sports fandoms).
However, it's possible that religion itself has been so thoroughly discredited throughout the West that it's not a stable basis for institution-building anymore.
and that pre-vetting works both ways .. and leads to cancellation, ostracism etc, (unrelated to what I see described as “wokism” ) its just tribalism isn’t it?
The cynical answer is that it's tribalism the whole way down, and I'm less confident that it's not than I wish I was. I'm also not confident that there's a better solution within the bounds of large-scale social psychology.
If you adopt that kind of social psychology as a constraint, there is (in my estimation) a pretty compelling argument for communities to get good at identifying their internal, "petty" elites, and for those elites to understand that they bear an obligation to the communities that selected them. Given the psychological constraints, I don't really see a way forward without intermediary institutions.
Yes, but...
a) I'd argue that those values are downstream from Christianity ("that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights"), and we never had a better way of grounding them other than simple assertion.
b) I'd say that we're losing sight of them, despite all the smaller wars we've had since WWII. And the potential of WWIII seems like it would harm civilization more than help it, so "engage in another total war" can't be the answer.
I blame Gavrilo Princip
Have you ever read any Christian philosophers like Edward Feser? I ask as the more rationalist type atheists find the Aristotle Aquinas logic more thought provokong { ie is any of the religion stuff actually true } or at the every least it makes one question a lot of metaphysical premises the 'it's just science all the way down' types usually are unaware they rely on
This seems very similar to the argument you put forward in "How the West was Won".
To whom it may concern, I suggest to read this pamphlet wrote by Chantal Delsol, a French Catholic philosophy scholar (therefore above all suspicion): https://www.editionsducerf.fr/librairie/livre/19337/la-fin-de-la-chretiente
Here the NY Times review: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/29/opinion/christianity-paganism-woke.html
Is pragmatism what cultural Christianity is all about? I confess that I'm a novice, but when I recently came across the notion I was almost instantly converted, not because it seemed expedient but because it seemed true. The English language, my mother tongue, is shot through with biblical and specifically Christian allusions ("confess", "novice", "converted"); we observe Easter and Christmas (and the Sabbath somewhat); we sing Handel's Messiah at Easter and carols at Christmas; we talk about pilgrimages and epiphanies; we turn the other cheek, refrain from casting the first stone and intone "greater love hath no man than this"; we call each other doubting Thomases, distribute loaves and fishes and accuse upstarts of thinking they can walk on water. We know what is meant when Brian's mother scolds, "He's not the Messiah. He's just a very naughty boy!" Furthermore, I approve, on the whole, of New Testament teachings, such as the injunction to forgive seventy times seven. What is more, traditional churches are beautiful. I want to see them preserved, not as museum pieces or tourist sights, but as meeting places for people who want to come together to celebrate their fellowship, observe quaint traditions and sing.
I find the cultural Christianity argument very convincing, but not quite in the terms Scott describes here, and more as an analytical tool than as a concrete proposal for change.
Here's the argument as I understand it: Christianity has shaped our society for a really long time. Most of our ideals and values have been heavily influenced or mediated by Christianity. We usually don't notice this because we're so used to our own values. For example, we consider the principle of equal human rights to be self-evident, and not an inheritance from Galatians 3:28, while the rights of animals are still up for debate. In reality, without Christianity we are adrift on Nietzsche's open seas (and that's [good|scary]).
I am not and will never be a Christian, but I suppose I can see how you would go from there to "...and therefore we should re-embrace Christianity" on conservative grounds.
> Only 10% of Israeli Jews are ultra-Orthodox, and it would be lower if they didn't breed so fast
This one is unlike the others on the list: Israel started as a secular project with almost no ultraOrthodox at all, and their numbers as a proportion of the population have been steadily growing (mostly because, as you note, they breed so fast). Israel actually ends up being fairly close to a steady state partly-religious society for this reason (see also your linked article about Israeli fertility from a few weeks ago).
So the cultural Judaism actually is a good question - I broadly dislike the state support for religion (especially enforcing no public transit or services on the Sabbath, but also helping them stay insulated by giving them special welfare and exemption from conscription). But if it helps the country stay at a somewhat steady just-post-religious state, with less woke/more casual culture/no fertility crisis, it might be a trade worth making.
(Sadly, we've never had any beautiful architecture in Israel at all).
> (Sadly, we've never had any beautiful architecture in Israel at all).
Wait, none?
Well, we've definitely never had a period where beautiful architecture was the norm (we moved straight from postwar construction with cheap ugly materials to modernism, and not especially nice kinda of modernism). There are some pretty buildings around (and personally I like the Jerusalem thing of covering every building in stone), but we never had a classic pretty architecture period.
Well, Jews in Israel did arguably have such a period, but it was in the 1400s in Tzfat, (Safed,) then in the early 1800s in Jerusalem - but much of this was lost or destroyed.
My biggest problem with how we talk about cultural Christianity (and our Judeo-Christian legacy more broadly), is that it so heavily discounts the Greco-Roman and Germanic cultural contributions (and even more ancient cultural roots), it takes credit for ideas that are common across humanity, and it disregards the degree to which Christianity has repeatedly been a huge obstacle to moral, political and scientific progress, rather than a driving force.
(In almost exactly the same way that dogmatic and violent Islamism is today, BTW – murdering heretics, spreading God’s word through blood and conquest, propping up dictators and authoritarian regimes, shutting down intellectual inquiry and discourse, oppressing large swaths of people, even going to war over the same stretch of land.)
Obviously, it’s impossible to completely disentangle the complete legacy of Christianity from modern Westernized culture, and I am not denying that Christianity has made positive contributions, too. (Though, the non-Christian world also has impressive architecture, art and music, so let’s not ascribe too much of that to a belief in a particular book.) It would be weird if it were *all* negative. But it should be obvious to anyone who looks at how we got here with half an honest and open mind, that so much of what we are, we are *despite* Christianity – because parallel strands of culture won out – not because of it.
<i>My biggest problem with how we talk about cultural Christianity (and our Judeo-Christian legacy more broadly), is that it so heavily discounts the Greco-Roman and Germanic cultural contributions (and even more ancient cultural roots), it takes credit for ideas that are common across humanity, and it disregards the degree to which Christianity has repeatedly been a huge obstacle to moral, political and scientific progress, rather than a driving force.</i>
What ideas in particular?
Are you trolling?
I am sure you are able to think of some influential Greek philosophers, some ancient Greek myths, arts, or literature that have helped shape our culture all the way down to our language. Likewise, you shouldn’t need much help to see some parallels between the Roman republic and the political and judicial system in the US – or some Roman influence in our calendar and the names of our months. The influence of the Germanic tribes may be harder to see (as they weren’t as prolific writers or masons), but through everything from the myths and fairy tales we share, to the names of the days that remind us of those myths, it has trickled down to us, and taught us an ethic of relative individualism and egalitarianism that is distinct from that of peoples elsewhere. It goes deeper than just ideas; it’s memes woven into daily life.
It’s not that these memes don’t exist in other cultures, or even in aspects of Christianity (the themes are often archetypical and universal), but that if you strip away any individual’s faith, and leave only the stories, our perspective is as flavored and colored by the stories of Narcissus and Sisyphus, the thinking of Aristotle and Socrates, the musings of Marcus Aurelius and oratory of Cicero, or the myths of Beowulf and of Odin, as it is by the life of Jesus of Nazareth and St. Paul. Even our version of Christianity itself is largely shaped by cultural practices from our ancestors before Christianity got to them. This is why there are Christmas trees, Easter bunnies, and Halloween costumes, and it probably goes some way toward explaining why parts of the Bible resonate so deeply, whereas other parts are easy for us to ignore.
Is this meant to be a reply to me? Because it doesn't really answer my question. I asked for specific ideas that get ascribed to Christianity but which are actually "common across humanity", not for vague generalities about the Greeks and Romans being influential, which nobody denies.
<i>It’s not that these memes don’t exist in other cultures, or even in aspects of Christianity (the themes are often archetypical and universal), but that if you strip away any individual’s faith, and leave only the stories, our perspective is as flavored and colored by the stories of Narcissus and Sisyphus, the thinking of Aristotle and Socrates, the musings of Marcus Aurelius and oratory of Cicero, or the myths of Beowulf and of Odin, as it is by the life of Jesus of Nazareth and St. Paul.</i>
It really isn't. Tom Holland's "Dominion" does a good job of explaining how our beliefs derive from Christianity, not pre-Christian paganism.
<i>This is why there are Christmas trees, Easter bunnies, and Halloween costumes,</i>
Those things (a) are pretty superficial compared to moral and metaphysical beliefs, and (b) aren't attested until hundreds of years after Christianisation and have no evidence linking them to pre-Christian pagan customs.
You’re right; I wasn’t specific enough. That’s fair. Some examples:
• I first noticed this when I was quite young. I was taught in school that The Golden Rule was a Christian thing, but found out from other sources that versions of it are common and predate Christianity.
• There are all the mythological tropes sprinkled throughout both the old and New Testament: The flood, the virgin birth, the return from the dead …
• More relevant, however, people often suggest some strong causal link between Christianity and concepts that are important to me, like egalitarianism, democracy, human rights, equality under god (≈ the law), etc., but they don’t get very specific about the connection. Usually it’s some suggestion about how Jesus made us individually responsible beings, answerable only to God and ourselves, whereas we used to be just … I dunno, sheep? I don’t see it, as I see plenty of signs of those things prior to Jesus. But they will argue that those things wouldn’t have been possible without Christianity. While I can admit that Christianity has shaped their current, Western-style manifestation, since they last re-emerged in a Christian context in Europe, I think it is much easier to find the seed of those ideas in the humanism of the ancient Greeks (democracy) and Romans (rule of law, etc). And there are clear signs that variations of those ideas (basic freedoms and equality) have been common (not universal) among peoples across the world since before the earliest civilizations.
• Elsewhere in this comment section someone seems to suggests that the Enlightenment would not have happened without Christianity, because the Reformation was instrumental in bringing it about. I don’t agree with the premise or the way the argument is made. I think we would have gotten to the enlightenment sooner without the reactionary Catholic Church holding its foot on the neck of free thought, speech and inquiry. The reformation and printing press simply took some of the weight off of that foot.
(The vagueness with which Christian Culture is given outsized credit for good things in Western tradition is typical, though. It often shifts the burden of proof: The people who did x were Christian, so obviously they did it because they were Christian. Don’t agree? Prove me wrong.)
Next: Tom Holland is good with history, but not so unbiased on Christianity, so his opinion carries little weight for me on this.
Finally: A) We’re not talking about metaphysics, but explicitly about _cultural_ Christianity. Holidays are as cultural as it gets. B) I mean, the etymology of Easter and Yule alone go some ways here, but if there’s something in the Bible about egg-laying bunnies, I’ll accept that it’s probably a Christian invention, and not brought in from some other culture.
The Greeks and Romans certainly didn't believe in egalitarianism or human rights. Some societies, like Athens, supported (at least in principle) legal equality *for citizens*, but there was no sense that *people in general* were or ought to be equal. Even in Athens, women and slaves were denied political rights, and of course the equality-loving Athenians were happy to conquer and enslave other city-states when they got the chance. As for rule of law, the Romans absolutely held rich, important people to a different standard to everybody else. In one trial I happened to be reading about recently, the defendant, a famous senator called Aemilius Scaurus, literally stood before the jury and said "Varius Severus [the prosecutor, a man of no reputation] of Sucro [an insignificant Roman colony in Spain] says that Aemilius Scaurus took a bribe; Aemilius Scaurus denies it. Whom do you believe?" and that was enough to get him acquitted.
That's not to say that the ancients had no concept whatsoever of equality or rule of law, or even that there weren't a few people who believed in the concepts in forms we'd recognise. But on a societal level, they didn't.
<i> think we would have gotten to the enlightenment sooner without the reactionary Catholic Church holding its foot on the neck of free thought, speech and inquiry.</i>
So why didn't China, or India, or the Islamic world get their first? They didn't have to deal with the Catholic boot stamping on a humanist face the way Europeans had to.
<i>Finally: A) We’re not talking about metaphysics, but explicitly about _cultural_ Christianity. Holidays are as cultural as it gets.</i>
We're talking about ideas and values, which are usually downstream of metaphysics.
<i>B) I mean, the etymology of Easter and Yule alone go some ways here,</i>
Most European languages don't use cognates of Easter and Yule to designate those festivals. (English doesn't even use "Yule", except in more poetic contexts where obscure words are more accepted.)
<i>but if there’s something in the Bible about egg-laying bunnies, I’ll accept that it’s probably a Christian invention, and not brought in from some other culture.</i>
False dichotomy. Something can be a Christian invention without being brought in from another culture. Christmas trees, for example, are first attested in the sixteenth century, and seem originally to have been a Lutheran practice -- and, last I checked, Lutheranism is a branch of Christianity.
> The Greeks and Romans certainly didn't believe in egalitarianism or human rights.
For the vast majority of the history of Christian Europe, aristocrats clearly did not believe in egalitarianism or human rights.
> Even in Athens, women and slaves were denied political rights
> As for rule of law, the Romans absolutely held rich, important people to a different standard to everybody else.
This seems pretty consistent with most of the history of Christendom too. Even granting that things got better after the Enlightenment (and granting that Christianity paved the way for the Enlightenment), it seems equally dubious to credit Christianity for equality or political rights for women.
The way I see it, the de-Christianization of society was basically inevitable after the Enlightenment, but it wasn't until the Enlightenment that the West really had the values worth preserving, so re-emphasizing Christianity is unlikely to help.
I’m making the point that non-Christian cultural influences are not given enough credit when certain people (particularly Christians) talk about the cultural heritage, that has brought us liberalism, capitalism, impressive scientific and technological progress, etc. Pedantically arguing and getting bogged down in the details of my examples is not engaging with that argument seriously.
It just gets weird when you admit Greek and Roman influence, and then retreat into positions like Athens wasn’t perfectly democratic, rule of law in Rome was flawed, and China’s golden ages of cultural and technological progress don’t count because reasons I didn’t quite understand …
None of that brings us much closer to proving that Christianity’s influence is not overrated.
Instead of quarreling about the role of evergreens in celebrating the winter solstice, you’ll have a much better chance at convincing me if you can make a good case for Judeo-Christian tradition in fact being more important than Greco-Roman and other pagan culture (or at least more important than you think I give it credit for) in shaping the best parts of modern, Western culture: Liberalism, capitalism, humanism, and periods of remarkable scientific and technological progress. Where in Christian tradition does the meat of those ideas come from?
I wonder how much of the decline of religion is due to the institutions being "captured" by a global elite who like to control from behind the scenes?
"I am no fan of medieval theocracy. But I do have a weakness for the 1880 - 1930 period of fin de siecle culture, Art Nouveau, economic liberty, and progressophilia."
Only an American could write those sentences, as if nothing significant happened in 1914.
I noticed that too. That era that Scott is talking about ended in 1914.
One could argue that, in America, it really did end in 1929. And that in Europe, it may have died in 1914, but the corpse didn't start to decay for another decade or two, depending on the location. I'm no expert, but the art and literature I've seen indicates to me that, while there was a lot of angst and soul-searching, there was also a lot of trying to pretend that everything was still fine and nothing had changed.
Good analogy! One-two punch of WW1 and the Depression. And I take your point about different experience in Europe and America. It wasn’t such a small world then.
Two thoughts to overcome those directional problems:
- why not only consider things at equilibrium? fair enough this never occurred in the past 150 years, so either we don't draw conclusions or we go back discussing Antiquity
- why not consider things with the horizon of your generation, in this case something that goes bad after two generations should not matter so much (sorry kids, your turn to figure out what you want to pass forward)
I tend to agree that a critical mass needs to believe Christianity is true in order to get the downstream positive effects. But a less hostile non-Christian culture seems like a win-win, slowing the decline of actual belief (and any remaining positive effects) while we await either RETVRN or a credible successor.
Accepting that the 1890s through 1930s were a cultural high point, is the claim that this was caused specifically by the decay of Christian belief? Were recently ex-christians over represented among artists, or was it the jostling of believers against unbelievers in the right proportion that brought it about?
>The "cultural Christianity" argument says that atheists might not like Christianity, but they like a culture which depends on Christianity. They like open, free, thoughtful, liberal, beautiful, virtuous societies.
> Unmoored from a connection to Christanity, a society will gradually have less of those goods, until even atheists are unhappy.
I fully believe the first part but not the second.
I think modern Western values are evolved from Christian values. Doesn't mean Christian values ain't outdated. But they were uniquely good and progressive for their time. And I don't like when people deny that the Enlightenment grew out as a product of Reformation, and that modern values that have now spread around the world are Christian values' descendants
> And I don't like when people deny that the Enlightenment grew out as a product of Reformation.
Let’s say you’re straightforwardly right. Would you deny that the Reformation and its success across Europe (where previous would-be reformers had failed) in significant part grew out as a product of the Renaissance (a return to ancient, pre-Christian Greek and Roman values), and of technological advancement (primarily the printing press), and not just from ideas intrinsic to Christianity?
Would you deny that the purpose of the Reformation was to reform a Christian church that had for centuries been allowed to be corrupt and greedy, systematically torturing and murdering dissidents, supporting authoritarianism and opposing any hint of democratization, egging on wars and crusades? That was the culture of Christianity at the time (and for a long time after).
The point is that the Reformation was hardly a natural continuation of Christianity as it was going, but a strong reaction to what it had become, driven forward by ideas and possibilities that came from both inside and outside Christianity, but are not critical parts of Christianity as history until that point proved.
If you want to claim that the culture carried forward by Christianity has been a force for good, you need to include all of Christianity in that, as well as give credit for both good and bad things to non-Christian influences where such credit is due.
The Roman Empire adopted Christianity in 313 AD. It then took 1400 years before we hit the Enlightenment, which some Christians want the credit for. But that seems like an awful long gestation period, and I don't think there's any evidence that the Catholic church was actively aiming for anything like the Enlightenment. Maybe with a weaker church it would have come sooner.
For the record, I do not want credit for the Enlightenment.
What does "mostly atheist" mean? Why the qualifier?
So I would say, in order to produce beautiful art, you have to have a more playful relationship with reality than hard-core rationalism/empiricism allows, and this playful relationship is often the effect of all manner of Woo. If you're worried that someone will think your incomplete picture of reality is a "steaming pile" (to quote one commenter) you probably won't back yourself to get over writer's block.
Having said that I enjoyed Unsong and have always liked Douglas Adams.
I would disagree-cultural Christianity acts as a kind of check and balance-it gets in the way of religious extremism and prevents the anarchy that follows atheism-the question of is god real or not is irrelevant because we will never identify what caused the Big Bang in the first place, we can only surmise and at the end of the day that’s not proof-besides perhaps god is the energy force of the universe and your soul is part of that energy force making us all part of the universe and therefore god-either way it doesn’t matter-what does matter is maintaining a liberal society based upon Christian values and cultural Christianity would seem to be the best way
Cultural Christianity follows the Zeitgeist, and as it jettisons the supernatural (to avoid shocking modern sensibilities), it becomes more and more irrelevant. Why bother being involved in something which already agrees with "the current thing"? You can do that just fine without being a member of a church.
Traditional churches are also getting the same fallout where people are just not bothering to turn up or get involved, and those remaining are probably cultural (it's the custom to get married in church, buried in church, and attend for Christmas and Easter, but belief doesn't really have any part to play in everyday life) and will diminish.
We may indeed see Christianity dry up and wither away in the West. What comes after, though, is indeed a question the secular should be seriously considering: making SCIENCE! the new god is not going to keep things going after the energy of 'things as we do them' runs out, and there is now the vacancy for 'what new system of ethical and moral and philosophical understanding will we adopt as the basis on which we make laws and treat others?'
Maybe you pin your hopes on some version of Utilitarianism and try to convince the world at large to adopt "the greatest good of the greatest number", but once you've finally kicked away "love your neighbour as yourself" and "who is my neighbour? everyone is your neighbour" and burned up the last vestiges of that idea, you better be pretty damn convincing to the people who ask "why the hell should I worry about other people's happiness or good? the rule is Look Out For Number One and that's me, baby!"
"We should be concerned about everyone" has its roots ultimately in "God created us and we are all equal in His eyes". The religion-free counter to that is "There's no God, nature created us. and we're not equal because see genetics; thus I *am* better, qualitatively, than him and I therefore have more rights than him and more right to have the good things".
I mean, we've *had* these arguments on here, and I don't mean the tired old accusation of HBD is racism: we've had discussions about 'some populations have more of beneficial traits than others' and discussions about embryonic selection to have better babies and 'more IQ always gooder' and the whole nine yards about "everyone is equal is nonsense; some people are clearly and indisputably smarter, or more beautiful, or more athletic, or more creative, or less violent and aggressive, less criminal, than others. there should be a baseline standard for who counts as 'human' or not, and those who fall below it don't have rights. there is no such thing as natural rights anyway'.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
For a lot of modern people, these are not 'truths', they are not self-evident, and there is no Creator to endow anyone with anything, and rights are not inalienable.
Root out the very last vestiges of the values system which formed our culture, and then I genuinely and sincerely wish you good luck in creating and establishing a replacement that won't degenerate into "might makes right and we have got the Gatling gun and they have not".
The poem you are quoting in your last line was written by a Catholic, and relative to modern sensibilities extremely-Christian medieval and early modern Europe was extremely far along the "might makes right" side of things, so Christianity certainly doesn't strike me as a reliable or effective bulwark against this attitude.
I think the author was condemning that sentiment? At least, that's what I take away from the verse.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/61521/61521-h/61521-h.htm#VI
Man, I'm glad I'm not a classical liberal any more.(or any other kind of liberal). Those were hard times, seeing how many forces were arrayed against my ideology, and feeling hopeless to do anything about it.
These are grim times indeed for a classical liberal.
A few random thoughts:
(1) Christianity was dominant in Europe from the late Roman Empire to the eighteenth century, or about 1500 years, give or take a few centuries. This is a very long period of time, and suggests that Christianity can form a stable civilisational equilibrium.
(2) Liberalism was dominant from around 1800 to 2015 or so, after which it was superseded by wokeness. This is a much shorter period of time, and suggests that liberalism has greater difficulty forming a stable equilibrium than Christianity does.
(3) By 1700, liberalism was already on the rise, even if it wasn't quite hegemonic yet, so I feel like it's cheating to say "If you went back to 1700s Christianity, it would still decay into liberalism", because you picked a point when the decay was already well advanced. If you turned the clock back to a period well before the rise of liberalism -- 1400, or 1000, or 500 -- the chances of liberalism again becoming dominant would I think be very slim.
(4) As others have pointed out, it's almost always liberal Christian denominations that have given way to wokeness, not traditionalist ones. You could argue that traditional Christianity is vulnerable to liberalism which in turn is vulnerable to wokeism, but traditional Christianity doesn't seem to be directly vulnerable to wokeism, at least not to anything like the degree liberalism is.
(5) Wokeism is, historically and philosophically, an outgrowth of liberalism. Liberalism believes that freedom of choice is key to the good life and that society should be organised on a principle of equality; wokeism is what you get when people realise that free choice and equality can be limited by social norms and biology as well as by explicit laws and regulations. This means that appealing to liberal principles is unlikely to hinder the rise of wokeness.
Also (6) If current trends continue, the people of pretty much every liberal country are on course to become hated minorities in their own homelands by the end of the century, if not earlier. Say what you want about Christendom, at least it wasn't actively suicidal in the way liberaldom is.
This is good stuff, and I'm going to drop this here to remind myself that I want to engage with it, but it will probably be a day or two.
It's true that older forms of Christianity failed to stop the rise of wokeness and scores of dangerous predecessor ideologies. But the Cultural Christianity argument is not that the optimal form of Christianity is or could ever be invincible. The argument is closer to: "We saw what happened as a civilization when we all moved away from Optimal Christianity, so you as an individual need to do your part to move society closer to Optimal Christianity." We're all fans of Chesterton's Fence around here but we're also should be fans of Chesterton's Fencepost: if you want to have an old fencepost you need to paint it regularly. You can't just count on the old paint to last. Every generation has to renew it
My problem with this is that the correlation seems to have the wrong sign. Over the last three or four hundred years our lives have changed vastly, and mostly for the better. Very few of us would swap our lives in 2024 for lives in 1624, 1724, 1824 or even 1924. And during that time the influence of Christianity in our society and the power of Christian institutions over us has generally declined. If anything, it suggests we should welcome the waning of Christianity among us.
Would you make the same arguments about living in the non-Christian societies of 1624, 1724, 1824 or 1924? In which case what you are arguing about is "prosperity and advances in health care and modern conveniences" and not the religious or cultural basis of the society.
Would you prefer to live, in 1724, under the rule of the Qing dynasty in China or that of George I in Britain? The Kangxi Emperor seems to have presided over a period of peace and prosperity, so you might prefer that - but you can't really say that it was a time of scientific advancement as the West classes that. George's reign didn't do much *except* see the influence of the monarchy declining and that of parliamentary rule increased.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangxi_Emperor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_I_of_Great_Britain
So which would you prefer, as a transition to the modern era?
I don't think that we (I am UK based, so that might be a small we) are post Christian, so much as we are post Quaker. If this is so then the argument that we should go back to a Christianity in general is misplaced, but more Friends could be fun.
I think you might be overstating their influence. Liturgically, they are a world away from the average Brit's understanding of what Christian worship looks like. No bells & smells, no hymns - no president or communion. Songs of Praise it isn't.
In terms of looks yes, but in terms of education of, and attitudes towards, women, the welfare state, worker's rights, prisons, clothes (we 'all' wear dull clothes now) and the way that we use time productively are Quaker things. They are not really C of E.
I take Scott's position to be in no small part about art and culture, so "how things look" is relevant.
For the cultural Christianity argument to have any persuasion at all, you need to admit the premise that culture is undergoing some kind of degeneration. Well, we're still healthier, better educated and more prosperous than ever. Art flourishes fractally and if what's in the mainstream isn't for you, you can easily find something that is. Meanwhile, every generation has its own version of wokeness and of those who feel with complete certainty that it will cause the downfall of society. The cultural Christianity argument is a foot soldier for the theocrats who would actually return us to Christian cultural domination, but societies historically become freer and more prosperous as they move away from religion. And this is a totally standard Enlightenment take that should have been here long before I arrived to make the 300somethingth comment.
I would put this question to you: why did the Enlightenment not happen in China or the Islamic world or Meso-America?
What was different to make it take root in European soil?
We've had this discussion with the review of "The Ballad of the White Horse". My good liberal fellows on here asking in all seriousness "Why did Alfred make a peace treaty with Guthrum? After his victory, why didn't he massacre all the Vikings?"
That's our freer, more prosperous society of today moving away from religion: why regard The Enemy as my neighbour? Kill him and be secure!
EDIT: Indeed, it's so not at all certain that the lovely shiny Enlightenment values automatically arise once we hit threshold X that people worry about AI alignment! If it were a natural truth that 'become sufficiently complex and this result pops up', we wouldn't have to be working on "can we teach the AI to align with our values", as that would happen just as the end result of Science And Progress. If we genuinely fear that an AI might decide to kill all humans, why do we think that? Why do we think that a created intelligence that is truly free of all contamination of religious belief would act in such a way?
"why did the Enlightenment not happen in China or the Islamic world or Meso-America?" A: the greatness of our philosophers, who either were out-and-out religious skeptics (e.g. Hume, Diderot) or tended to have extremely unorthodox religious views (e.g. Locke, Spinoza). I think it's pretty tendentious to claim victory for religion here.
Insufficient. Were there no atheist/materialist thinkers in China, India, or other non-Christian societies?
If your argument is "the force of religion there was too strong", then what made Christianity different, that it could be dissolved away? If there's nothing special about Christianity, then why did other cultures under other religions not also come to the same conclusions?
What did Baruch Spinoza do for STEM and creating economic value? Tell me his influence in persuading venture capitalists to invest in this upcoming project that will improve the world!
One thing that need to be addressed with this kind of argument (why did this happen in this place and not in another one) is that we would need to be able to make sure it wouldn’t truly happen in another place.
Suppose I give you two fair dices. You roll them only once: one rolls 6, the other rolls 2. Are we able to conclude that there is a unique trait on the first dice that allowed it to roll 6 instead of the other? No, we know in this situation that it was a simple matter of random chance: if we roll them again and again, we see that there is nothing special abaout any dice, they are equally able to roll 6.
Sure, reducing the complexities of society and history to the roll of a die is excessive, but the point is that there could be the possibility of our understanding being biased by the one single timeline we have to study.
There’s a corresponding argument against cultural Christianity - that it’s the root of wokeness, or a general culture of victimhood and pity-seeking - which I think also merits rebuttal. My (I guess contrarian?) opinion is that Christianity is far less influential than most people think, and hasn’t been very influential for a while. Both the best and worst aspects of western modernity are mostly explained by our wealth, technology, and reactions to certain historical events like the world wars, rather than by the ghost of Christianity. It’s actually closer to the truth that the last few generations of Christians are basically secular humanists who just wear the superficial ornamentation of a hollowed out religion than that modern secular people are unwitting Christians.
I find it really weird that your go-to summary for today's culture declining is "wokeness and postmodernism" as opposed to, say, nationalism, far-right populism, and demagoguery.
In the era of Trump, Putin, Xi, Modi, Le Pen, Netanyahu, Musk, Orban, AfD, et al, I know who to be scared of: left wing academics and civil service hiring managers!
Trump is opposed by almost all of the powerful institutions in US politics, and there's no guarantee he'll be re-elected.
Musk is a classical liberal more than anything else, and the fact that he's now considered "far-right" tells you a lot about how far left the US has shifted.
Putin, Xi, Modi, Le Pen, Netanyahu, Orban, and the AfD are all outside the US, so it makes sense for Scott, an American resident, to be less concerned about them than about developments in the United States.
Crazy how far-right demagogues just crop up like natural disasters, they couldn't possibly be *reactions* to anything, could they? Lacking all agency, lacking all soul and thought and values, how could such unfeeling robots not see that *your* beliefs are the one true path to goodness? Sad that they have so much popular support! Really, quite a tragedy that not everyone is so enlightened as you.
If you made a sincere argument I'd be very receptive to it.
Concerning 1880-1930: the western world was certainly in a default Christian mode, where the majority believed, nearly all who did not said that they did, and very few were openly unbelieving. But the rot had set in, and I take your point. After religion has lost its mainstream influence it takes time for a society to lose the cultural effects, and this is a pleasant time to live if you are an atheist: society is orderly and polite and you don't have to mumble meaningless words on a Sunday. We could look at stretching that period out to 1970 and still be able to make a case that one lived under the benefits of a (largely) post-Christian society. But all good things come to an end, and after the drive of Christianity has shut down, the ballistic trajectory will gradually decay.
I'm an atheist who grew up in a 50's-60's rural English village. If I still lived there (I suppose 'there' means time as well as place) I'd be content to attend the Anglican church, and use my time there as I did as a child, examining the architecture, and wondering why there was a memorial stained glass window to St Hubert of Liège, the patron saint of hunters. I would hope that Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer is still used there, as it is a work of poetry as much as anything. Unless they have changed greatly vicars were not at all upset to have attendees who were not worshippers, and if they are, well, they deserve their dwindling congregations. I'd do it for my own sake, but I doubt that many would, and certainly not enough to revivify cultural Christianity. As it is, I am completely free from temptation to visit any of the baptist or United Church of Canada institutions that surround me, as they all lack the unwritten constitution of the C of E of the era: we'll all go through the motions and avoid at all costs any actual mention of what we believe, or don't.
In reading through the comments here, one idea that pops up a lot is cultural Christianity was replaced by wokeness, or degraded into wokeness. Maybe with a step in-between, but that this was the chain.
At an intuitive level, this basically seems correct to me, at least in the west.
Well, going through all common Christian moral beliefs and all common woke moral beliefs, and comparing them against each other, would be long. It's doubtful much agreement could be found there, at least among those who are neither Christian nor woke.
But there is one core difference between Christianity and wokeness that I think gets at the heart of which one is better for society. Christianity strongly promotes forgiveness, and wokeness clearly does not. Christianity wants to redeem, wokeness wants to cancel. In secular terms, this means Christianity is more pro-rehabilitation and wokeness is more pro-punishment. I think the Christian approach to "people behaving badly" is far superior to the woke approach to "people behaving badly".
At the moment, it *feels* that (cultural) Christianity and wokeness are the two most prominent moral systems in the west. That these may be the only two viable options for the foreseeable future.
If so, it might be prudent to make a clear choice between them. In making that choice, you can specify areas where you disagree with your choice, but still make clear why you prefer your choice overall. So you don't need to sacrifice any integrity or pretend to belief something that you don't.
The primary view of humanity in Christianity is that humans were created in god’s image. That’s what makes us special; different from the animals. And under god’s rule. Believing that is key to Christianity. But I’ve always found the reverse more believable. That Christianity is a reflection of our humanity and culture. A combination of what we’ve known over generations makes us work well together + the collective culture values of specific points in time + what those in power wanted at the time. This is why religions are always evolving and changing their rules and laws. Going from orthodox to conservative to modern. If I want more people to join my club, and my club’s message does not have any sort of awareness problem, I then need to make my club more attractive to them. From this argument it’s easier to see that instead of a society needing cultural Christianity to thrive, the Christians are more hangers-on, grasping at the values of a previous generation and railing about how things were better in the past before inevitably adopting the current values and then railing about how much better those were in the next generation. Until we’ve now come to a place where modern Christianity is less a reflection of what used to make us great and more a collection of gripes about what people didn’t like about the last cultural movement. You’ll always find people who feel unmoored by the current society and that’s modern Christianity’s best way to try to grow the club right now.
That Christianity's propositions at any given time are downstream of a broader Culture is true for certain values of Christianity (e.g., any church flying the up-to-date iteration of the pride flag), but you're going to need something more concrete to show that the Church was playing catch-up you whatever was trendy with the masses.
This underestimates the resilience of Christianity. Christian cultural hegemony did sort of collapse after the 1890s, yet by the 1950s, in the US at any rate, it was back. Before that, Christian cultural hegemony collapsed in the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, but then revived dramatically in the Victorian era.
But of course, that's only possible because some *really believe.* Like me. It takes believing Christians to keep the churches strong. Mere cultural Christians are just along for the ride, and may weaken it. To that extent, I'd agree with your rejection of the cultural Christianity argument.
The real value of the cultural Christianity argument is the support it gives to apologetics.
Let proposition A be that Christianity is true. Let proposition B be that Christianity has a unique propensity to foster free, creative, productive, livable cultures.
What is P(B|A)? Probably high. The content of Christianity strongly suggests that a loving God who wants to save mankind would seed a church with a propensity, among other things, to create free, creative, productive, livable cultures.
What is P(B|~A)? Probably low. Most human myths have not fostered free, creative, productive, livable cultures, so we shouldn't expect Christianity to do so either.
So suppose you start with some subjective probability of the truth of Christianity P(A), and then you notice that B is true? Do the Bayesian updating math, and you'll see why the cultural Christianity argument is a reason to take more seriously the possibility that God really did create a good world which went wrong through sin, but then became a man to save people from their sins, working towards an ultimate redemption of that fallen world.
It's the most difficult and uncomfortable kind of truth imaginable: the truth of deceit itself. It's a philosophical ouroborous that can neither be solved in conventional terms, nor dismissed and rendered obviate: that in order for truth to mean anything, there must be lies and falsehoods, which must be in some sense "true" in order to mean anything, else they wouldn't work or having lasting power.
Reading this article made me think of two examples of this principle in practice: a) for drinking in moderation, and b) for a healthy video gaming culture. Both of these things seem to have some benefit from a system which officially disapproves or does not tolerate the practice with heavy limits and regulation, but where there are plenty of unacknowledged routes for the practices to occur so long as people aren't obnoxious about it. It's only when we publicly admit the truth that neither of these things are inherently bad, and remove formal bans on them, that you get binge drinking chaos in the streets and grown men obsessed with Pokemon, and an industry awash with freemium, pachinko and bloat.
Yet in both of the above cases, exactly as with Christianity and Judaism, the seeds of self-defeat are sown within. Drinking always becomes publicly tolerated, and and video games have become totally mainstream. Both have in some sense helped, yet in other senses hurt their respective practice. The help is an increase in modesty and a sort-of baseline realism - we all like a drink and it sometimes helps, and video games are fun and anyone can enjoy them - but also danger with a sort-of falsehood attached to it - maybe it's wrong to say drinking is okay when some people can't handle it, and maybe it's wrong to make video games a macro industry when a lot of "mature gaming" is extremely sad.
The third example, I feel (and maybe fear) is our entire system of professional credentials. Our schooling system is abominable in so many respects, yet we all tolerated it for many many years without complaint because it seemed to result in genuinely good results: the overall best people for each job got their rightful place, and it was simple and fair for those who came runner-up to take their progress and shift to a worthy alternative spot. This is the "truth" of the system, even if the specific standards were somewhat false.
Nowadays we have rampant credentialism in lockstep with a feeling of gross incompetency across all occupations, and a genuinely feeling like our schools are infantilising prisons, universities poison and jobs run by nitwits and DEI monsters. It seems to be *ENTIRELY false* right now! Their is a growing feeling across all sects of society for the entire structure to change, and I believe this will come to pass. But will this solve the deep problem at play? Will we end up with a system that is true? Or will the baby be thrown out with the bath water?
I reckon the key truth lies (.... odd turn of phrase, isn't it) in studying this and identifying the parts that apply to the other examples present, including the arch example of our overall liberal, enlightened, secular culture itself. If I eyeball all of these facets of life from a certain angle, squinting carefully, what I see is a system of filters - filters for behavioural quality and excellence, that constantly need updating and eventually replacing whole-sale. There are specific filters and broad filters, and filters within filters. The system of filter update and replacement itself has a massive meta-filter, and when that works, we can accept the endless cycling of the lower filters as educational - they are features of the system, not bugs - but when the biggest filter breaks down, chaos ensues. And it all boils down to some relationship between truth and falsehood - the truths that guide versus the truths which distract, and the falsehoods that are harmless and serve as good-enough heuristics versus the truly deceptive or manipulative lies.
To put all this in perspective requires us to take this knowledge and apply it to some of the basics of our thought - which is to acknowledge the finitude of our minds. We cannot completely model the entire world, and thus must create a simplified understanding based on what we've encountered and the principles inferred. This model will conform to reality in some senses, perspectives and contexts, and defect in others. Some models are better than others, and some patterns of meta-models tend to make better models than others. But all models turn false and need replacing eventually - and replace them we must, because ultimately models are good for us, absolutely necessary, beneficial, and in many respects rather fun once grasped. But the exact point at which a model should be replaced, a filter should be updated, remains tricky.
Perhaps the final answer, if such a thing can be delineated at all, is this: more frequent updates = less time spent under rotten, decaying systems that help no-one. But people are often uncomfortable and annoyed when their system is constantly changing, and crave the ease of familiarity. Half of our souls wants constant change, evolution and growth and the other half wants security to the point of nostalgia. So maybe the real secret is to have a system which somehow satisfies both, by simultaneously constantly changing AND staying the same, a Schrodinger's cat of belief. Is it possible?
Anthropology used to think of a progression from magic, via religion to science. The catholic church played a pivotal transitional role as both promoting magic (miracles, saints, demons, excorcisms, etc) and rationalization. (This would confirm that catholicism cannot be a stable worldview over longer time periods.) On the other hand, a modern view of magic is not that we overcame it but that it still has an important role to play. Maybe understanding this issue better could shed some light on your question?
The argument here from the Catholic side is that miracles are not magic and the underlying philosophies are different, but since folk religion often uses prayers and so forth as much the same as charms and spells, yeah I see why anthropologists classify it as all the same kind of thing.
"The argument here from the Catholic side is that miracles are not magic" ... that could be taken as confirmation that catholicism is transitionary ... both promoting magic and rationalizing it ...
I have Thoughts on this but I don't have time right now to develop them, I will get back to you on this!
That would be great ... more generally, I am interested in the role of magic in todays world ... funnily enough I just read that Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks that "they can control the weather"
This reminds me of the LOTR books, where Sam asks Galadriel if her Mirror is magic, and she replies "I don't know what your people mean by that word, they seem to use the same word for the tricks of the Enemy."
I think it makes sense to use one word for miracles and magic, because both are supernatural interventions in the chain of causality. There's a drought --> I [pray to God for rain/do a magic rain ritual] --> supernatural forces cause rain. In a way, miracles are magic that God does.
Of course, the key difference between miracles and magic is control. Magic is something you seek to control, by wearing a magic ring or wielding a staff or commanding a genie or whatever. With miracles, you don't control them; at most, you humbly ask God to do something; a lot of the time, back in Biblical times, God just does a miracle without any input from you, and more likely than not, it scares the living daylights out of you.
“There is something which unites magic and applied science (technology) while separating them from the "wisdom" of earlier ages. For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem of human life was how to conform the soul to objective reality, and the solution was wisdom, self-discipline, and virtue. For the modern, the cardinal problem is how to conform reality to the wishes of man, and the solution is a technique.”
Very nice. So is the difference between magic and science that one gives an illusion of control and the other gives actual control? This sounds plausible, but could be critiqued from two directions. One is that, despite all the science we have, the socio-ecological system on our planet is completely out of control (Ukraine, Middle East, climate change, biodervisity loss, etc). The other is that magic may have played roles that are rather independent from controlling anything (as eg described by Evans-Pritchard).
I think Lewis and Tolkien would say that both magic and science give an illusion of control. Perhaps the time scales of that realization are different though.
I can agree with this. But that leaves open the question of whether control is the aim of magic in the first place?
I don't think people should hold their noses and go "Well this supernatural stuff is all rubbish but I'll cross my fingers and pretend, just for the secular benefits". That's no good to anyone. Be hot or cold, not lukewarm.
What I do think, though, is that Western society is based on the values of Christianity. That's what I want recognised and acknowledged. And right now we're living on the capital. Yes, we're post-Christian (sort of), but the underlying attitudes still are what is at the base of the foundation, like foundation sacrifices (https://www.jstor.org/stable/25510484).
Liberal/Enlightenment values will not just magically and organically pop up once a society reaches a certain level, and I think we see that by looking at the non-Christian cultures of the world we inhabit. Most of the globe has adopted Western systems, e.g. voting in elections and the like, along with secularisation and capitalism. But they didn't arise independently in those societies, and we have to question "why was Europe different?"
People have tried answering that (guns, germs and steel, I believe is one) but the whole core *values* are what forms a society, and they're very different.
And yes, I think our own Western society is changing as the old reservoir is used up. Modernity may not turn out to be so nice as we like to imagine it is, under the Whig view of inevitable and eternal progress and uplift. I'm not going to fight the culture war on here, but over the time I've been wandering around on the Internet, especially in fandom circles, I've seen a gradual but definite shift in values.
And I'm not talking about sex and drugs and rock'n'roll, where it's "yeah, you fuddy-duddy old conservatives are against fun", I'm talking about what I would consider ethics and the treatment of fellow human beings. Even the definition of "who is my neighbour?" is coming under question. "Why is X a bad thing, it's pragmatic and effective" is another. We're coming around, even the nice socially liberal "as many genders as the colours of the rainbow" types, to "yeah, if torture works, use it, what's so wrong with torture?" Those people are the Bad Guys and in fact they're not even really people, so why not? We're the Good Guys, it's okay if we do it.
We're using up what was left of the underlying, assumed values that came along with Christianity, and what is coming to replace them - well, I don't much like the shape of it, even if it assures me I can be what I self-define to be (just so long as I hold the Correct And Approved Opinions, otherwise I don't count as a person or a fellow-human).
Hi Deiseach!
Boy howdy do I have Lots of Thoughts on your post.
First, the good part! I agree with you that Christianity is responsible for our modern, Western, small-l liberal values, and we ought to be grateful. But not in the way you probably mean. Modern morality was caused not by "Christianity is a shining exemplar of great moral values," bur rather, by the early medieval church's prohibition on polygamy and cousin marriage. Joseph Henrich lays out the case in his book "The WEIRDest people in the world" - it's a brilliant book, I highly recommend it. Here's the (very abbreviated and simplified) causal chain:
-in most agrarian societies, people commonly marry their cousins or other relatives. This keeps the wealth in the family and also keeps the family as a sort of "superorganism." The extended family/clan/tribe is everything; the individual qua individual has very few rights. You put your head down and do as your elders tell you and know your place.
-but in the early Middle Ages, the Church banned polygamy and cousin marriage in Western Europe.
-Now people have to go outside their extended family to find a spouse!
-Slowly, gradually, this lets people start to think of themselves as individuals, separate from their family/tribe.
-Over many centuries, this leads some people to come up with radical ideas like "All men are equal" and such. And presto, modern Western morality! (There are lots more details I am omitting for the sake of time.)
If you're about to protest, "but drosophilist, you don't need this long convoluted process, St. Paul wrote 'there is neither Gentile nor Jew, we are all one in Christ Jesus' almost 2000 years ago," Henrich and I say, yes, these are inspiring *words*, but for them to make a difference to how society actually works, you need the social transformation described above. Buddhism has wonderful teachings about universal lovingkindness and compassion, but modern morality did not arise in predominantly Buddhist countries.
OK, this comment is getting long, I'll write a second comment.
As I said to another person, I haven't time right now but I will come back to talk with you on this.
Briefly, I very much agree with Scott: don't pretend you're a Christian (or Jewish or Muslim or Buddhist or what you like) because you're hoping to squeeze some secular benefit out of it. Be honest about not believing and just wanting to keep the nice bits.
Cultural Christianity can be taken two ways: the 'cafeteria Catholic' view where one picks and chooses which bits appeal and which bits to reject, like selecting from a menu. That's what annoys a lot of people who are more orthodox. There's the way Scott is using it, I think, or at least how the discussion is developing: that the culture of the West is, or was, Christian and the nice Enlightenment values, which then turned around and bit the hand that fed them, arose out of that and not out of simply "society got richer, more educated, and more liberal" so it could happen anywhere at any time just from "more money makes us all nicer".
OK but... you're not actually contradicting what I said? Joseph Henrich's thesis is not "we got Western secular morality by becoming richer and more educated," his thesis is "we got Western morality out of the historical contingency of the Church prohibiting cousin marriage, which, over centuries, led people to think of themselves as individuals." So yes, the Church was necessary, Christianity was necessary to get us to this point, but now that we're here, secular morality will do just fine.
Not cousin marriage *alone*, though. There was an entire package of beliefs which translated into practice. Royal families did their best to keep going with cousin marriage (on the basis that they couldn't find suitable mates otherwise) so that alone was not the big turning point.
*Why* did the Church ban cousin marriage? *Why* did it come up with the notion of degrees of consanguinity and what was technically incest? Certainly it took on laws and customs from civil society around it:
https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04264a.htm
"In early Roman times marriage of cousins was not allowed, though it was not infrequent after the Second Punic War. Marriage between uncle and niece was unlawful among Romans. Consanguinity in the direct line, to any extent, was recognized by the Church as an impediment to marriage. Worthy of notice is the declaration by Nicholas I (858-67) in his letter to the Bulgarians, that "between those persons who are related as parents and children marriage cannot be contracted, as between father and daughter, grandfather and granddaughter, or mother and son, grandmother and grandson, and so on indefinitely". Billuart, however, calls attention to the fact that Innocent III, without distinction of lines, allows indiscriminately infidels converted to Christianity to retain their wives who are blood-relations in the second degree. Other theologians take it for granted that this declaration of Innocent III has no reference to the direct line. In the early ages the Church accepted the collateral degrees put forward by the State as an impediment to marriage. St. Ambrose (Ep. lx in P.L., XVI, 1185) and St. Augustine (City of God XV.16) approved the law of Theodosius which forbade (c. 384) the marriage of cousins. This law was retained in the Western Church, though it was revoked (400), at least in the East, by Arcadius, for which reason, doubtless, the text of the law has been lost. The Code of Justinian permitted the marriage of first cousins (consobrini), but the Greek Church in 692 (Second Trullan Synod, can. liv) condemned such marriages, and, according to Balsamon, even those of second cousins (sobrini)."
We've seen the push back against restrictions on marriage, which would formerly have been seen as incestuous, with that famous case of the "marriage with deceased wife's sister" in British law. Why do men want to marry their sisters-in-law? As the discipline around marriage relaxed (in the name of compassion and progress), such restrictions also came to be seen as onerous and then ridiculous:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deceased_Wife's_Sister's_Marriage_Act_1907
"Prohibited degree of kinship for marriage included relatives by blood (consanguinity) to prevent incest, and extended to relatives by marriage (affinity) apparently reflecting an analogous taboo, or the idea that a married couple were "one flesh".
...The 1907 refusal of Holy Communion by the vicar of Eaton, Norfolk, to a parishioner legally married to his deceased wife's sister was overruled in 1908 by the statement of the Arches Court (a ruling upheld in 1912 by the House of Lords) that section 1 of the 1907 Act meant the Sacrament Act 1547 no longer applied to such spouses.
...The 1907 Act did exactly what it said and no more. It was amended by the Deceased Brother's Widow's Marriage Act 1921 to allow a widow to marry her deceased husband's brother. This was a response to First World War deaths to encourage remarriages, reducing war widows' pensions and increasing the birth rate."
And now we're slowly creeping back to "sure, marry your niece/nephew/cousin/step-sibling/anyone you like" as the strictures of religion, or the influence of such past strictures, are melting away. Don't be so quick to boast of the secular success, when the secularisation is washing away the foundations for such taboos in the first place.
Prohibition of cousin marriage did not lead to people thinking of themselves as individuals, that's a foolish notion. What has become of our vaunted individualism? "I can do what I want and I should be able to do what I want, so if I want to marry my cousin or step-sister then I should be let do so!" and give that a few centuries to get us back to the problem Henrich claims has been solved (see the alleged popularity of incest porn).
i'd say that people thinking of themselves as individuals is the *problem*, not the solution, and is responsible for most of what I dislike about western societies.
Given that we're currently engaged in reintroducing polygamy under the guise of "polyamory", and a lot of the culturally influential parts of society see individualism as a sign of white supremacy, I'm not sure this is a good rebuttal of Deiseach's point.
OK, here's my second comment, In Which I Question Deiseach's Claim That Christianity = Good Morality.
"Even the definition of "who is my neighbour?" is coming under question."
Why yes, it is. Imagine, if you would, a devout Catholic who runs for public office and who deliberately spreads vicious lies about his own constituents, saying that they eat pet cats and dogs, because he thinks it will help him win. These people are not HIS neighbors! They're immigrants from a different and inferior culture, they disturb the Real Americans(TM) of a salt-of-the-earth American town, f**k them! He doesn't owe them anything. So what if their kids' school had to be shut down one day because of bomb threats? I'm sure Jesus would approve.
"yeah, if torture works, use it, what's so wrong with torture?"
Certainly there's nothing wrong with it, not according to the pious, devout European Christians of centuries past, who used to torture suspected heretics, apostates, and witches with great gusto. Nobody expects the... ah forget it.
"what is coming to replace [Christian values] - well, I don't much like the shape of it"
Let me tell you what I don't like: self-proclaimed God-fearing, devout Evangelical Christians in America falling in with a greedy, petty, vain, vengeful, dishonest, all-around sleazy crook and cheat and considering him the Lord's anointed servant who can do no wrong in their eyes. Just the other day a preacher called Kamala Harris "Jezebel" for the sin of... opposing Trump and running for President while female, I guess.
Now let me hasten to add: you can certainly make a long list of horrible things atheists have done and said. No group of people have a monopoly on virtue or vice. As Solzhenitsyn wisely said, "The line between good and evil runs through every human heart."
As to the "shift in values" you observed on the Internet - the Internet/social media is a really crappy place to look for values; it seems to bring out the worst in people. No wonder you think society is going to pot if that's where you look! There's a lot more good in people than you would guess by looking at Reddit or whatever. Of course, I'm posting this on the Internet, how's that for irony? Anyway, have to go now.
Your accusation there is hypocrisy, not "These things are of no value".
Yes, absolutely, with the addition of "you don't *need* to be a Christian to understand that torture, falsely accusing others, fomenting hate, etc. are bad things."
Anyway, I do have to get some work done now.
You don't need to be a Christian. You do need to live in a society that inherits a culture marinated in:
"38 “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ 39 But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. 40 And if anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. 41 And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. 42 Give to the one who begs from you, and do not refuse the one who would borrow from you.
43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. 46 For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? 47 And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? 48 You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect."
Because these things are *not* self-evident, as we have seen all over the world before an Enlightened Person comes along to teach them.
OK, I lied, one more reply for the road and then I'll go!
These words by Jesus are beautiful and inspiring and also have jack-all to do with how the vast majority of Christians have *actually* behaved throughout the vast majority of Christendom's history. Yes, there have been martyrs who lived and died by "turn the other cheek" and "love thy enemy" as well as more recent heroes like MLK Jr. who took this as their inspiration.
But on the level of the whole civilization? Who actually turns the other cheek and loves their enemy? The crusader who massacres heathens with a cry of "Deus vult!"? The military commander who, when asked how to tell heretics from innocents, says "Kill them all, God will know his own"? Queen “Bloody” Mary, who had Protestants burned at the stake? The Trump supporters who adore their Orange God King precisely because he hates the same people they hate?
Obligatory Gandhi quote: "I like your Christ. I don't like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ."
Again, that's all just "but you guys don't live up to the words". Why do you expect us to live up to the words, if the words come from a place of falsehood? There are no gods, so Jesus wasn't god, so if He was talking about "God says do this" He was wrong.
You can't take, as liberal Christians do, the 'nice' parts like the Golden Rule then go "right, we've invented this thing called the Enlightenment all out of our own heads and we've dumped religion and religion has nothing to do with how our minds were shaped".
The influence of Christianity is the water we fish all swim in. Now the water is drying up. Where are you going to get new springs of water? And don't say "well everyone knows that the niceness principle comes right out of evolution" because the hell it does, and other societies have demonstrated that.
> This period wasn't very religious - Nietzsche had already declared God dead in 1882.
It’s worth remembering that Nietzsche’s proclamation wasn’t meant to say “everyone’s, like, totally over that whole God thing”. Rather, he was saying exactly the same thing as the cultural Christians: people had lost their explicit faith in God, but they hadn’t carried through the full impact of that loss - their beliefs and their lives were now a building without a foundation, doomed to fall. (This fall would be the “revaluation of all values”, one of Nietzsche’s highest projects.)
From the parable of the madman, showing that he is received by and talking to atheists, and that he chides them for not fully carrying through the implications of a loss of God:
> Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: “I seek God! I seek God!”—As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated?—Thus they yelled and laughed.
> The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I.“
…
> Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. “I have come too early," he said then; “my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves.”
You can read the whole thing (which is quite beautiful, and only like 2.5x the length of what I quoted) on creation.com for some reason: https://creation.com/nietzsche-madman
Interestingly diverse comments to this one.
Few of us have decision-making power when it comes to our country’s overall “culture” and where that is heading. But we do have decision-making power when it comes to how to raise our children.
More specifically: Should those of us who presently are non-believers none the less raise our children in the faith we have left? Or, more nuanced: How much should we expose our children to our own former belief? None? A little? A lot? All in?
I would be interested in the views of other commentators here. (The question will soon be relevant also for Scott and his wife, I notice.)
My “realized preference”, as I look back, was not to send my kids to Sunday school or otherwise engage them in organized Christianity. I raised them as non-believers, and my wife agreed (or went along) with this.
But on vacations when they were children, we always visited churches. Or other temples when we could enter (Buddhist, Islam, Judaism). Showing deference (such as remove cap before entering, not to speak loud, respect the atmosphere, spend some time there). Installing in the children that this is no ordinary place for those who enter. This is a place which is beyond merely advanced “entertainment” (the unavoidable curse of secular modernity – everything turns deep-down into entertainment, including high art).
And I observe that my children, when they now do their own travel, keep this habit of visiting and spending time in places of worship. And listen to church music, alongside other types of music.
Which I am glad they do, as so do I.
...Edit to clarify the link to Scott’s post: Assuming that a “cultural Christian” is someone who mimics belief in order to “save civilization” or some other tactical, collective purpose, you can hardly be a “cultural Christian” (or any other religious belief) in front of your kids. And your kids are the only ones your religious beliefs are likely to have an impact on. Unless you want your kids to perceive you as a hypocrite when they grow up, and/or you do not want to be fully honest to them about your real beliefs for the rest of your life, and/or you want to instill in them a cynical, tactical attitude toward religion.
By visiting houses of worship on vacation, you successfully transmitted the value "it's good to go to houses of worship on vacation." Okay, fine, they get to see some cool art and learn how other people live, but this seems to be inconsequential. I don't think anyone argues that we will rescue civilization from it's enemies by gawking at art in a Buddhist temple once a year.
If you send your kids to Sunday School, you'll pass on the value "it's good to send your kids to Sunday School." I'm not sure what possible use that could have. If Christianity has a benefit to civilization (it does) it's going to require individual commitment to practice that's greater than what you decided not to give your children.
Yeah, well, it may seem “inconsequential” to you. Maybe it is. But notice that the purpose of giving your children something is not to “rescue civilization”. Anyone who thinks one’s individual actions can save something like that, and acts based on such a motive, would suffer from delusions of grandeur.
The purpose of giving your children something is to give your children something. Nothing more, nothing less.
So here’s the thing. Like many who have left a religion, I ascribe whatever depth I have in my mortal soul to the years it took to break free. Meaning I would not be without it, for complex psychological reasons. And I want my children to have depth in their souls.
..but I can hardly raise them in the religion of my father, assuming that it will set them on a similar journey. Imagine the situation when they reach puberty: “Dad, why did you imprint religion in us as children, when we have later found out that you yourself do not believe?” “Because I wanted you to have the experience of breaking free”. “But we will never be able to break totally free! Remember the Jesuits and what they said about having a child till it is seven!” “Yes, and that is what I wanted to achieve.”
…what I wanted to do instead, was to give them the light version. Providing depth in their souls without a wound that runs too deep. Hence churches, to get across that here we are dealing with something genuinely important, that you must make up your mind about. That journey will limit the risk that you end up as shallow people.
If you have children yourself, and a similar background, you may understand.
So, I was raised like this. Without any religion, or really any specific teachings one way or the other about it. In fact it never even occurred to me to ask my parents what they thought of the topic, that's how much of a non-issue it was. I still couldn't tell you, though I assume they are non-believers.
I don't think you should be worried about this "depth of your soul" thing that you're worried about. Life has plenty of things in it to give someone character and depth - wrangling their way out of fairytales doesn't need to be one of them. I do not find myself to be more or less deep or compassionate or serious or thoughtful or any of that because I didn't have to fight my way through that specific nonsense, as opposed to many other forms of nonsense, and no one who knows me gives me that indication either.
I also don't think that visiting churches is at all relevant. I for example love going to Church with people on the rare occasions I'm invited. I love Christmas and bringing out my manger and creche decorations. To me it's all just enjoyable on a purely aesthetic level no different than Halloween and I have no deeper angst or emotional association with it at all - Santa and Jesus are the same, to the extent I have no feelings towards either of them beyond as a fun holiday theme, though Santa obviously is much more appealing because he's jolly and has a flying sleigh and a cool outfit, while Jesus is just a hippy beggar.
Here's what you should perhaps be worried about. Which somewhat goes to the topic of Scott's post. You likely DO have a lot of underlying assumptions/norms/feelings that you retain from your religious upbringing, which you don't identify as being associated with your prior religion because they aren't directly coded that way, but which did sort of flow from it in a way you might not realize. And if you aren't passing THOSE messages on in the same way, your kids probably won't absorb them or feel the same feelings. My mother did once remark to me that it never occurred to her that by raising her kids without religion that we wouldn't absorb certain assumptions she had. Because she just assumed they were more natural, inherent human feelings, than they apparently are.
I can't necessarily identify all of them, but feelings about something like sex seem like an obvious one. My parents were not religious nor practiced or believed in any religious restrictions or customs, yet they retained a basic sense that sex is best in a loving relationship. I think most previously religious people feel that way. I never absorbed that message or a lot of others that have to do with a sort of...feeling that certain things are "sacred" even if you don't actually believe in the concept of sacred anymore.
So I guess I would say that you should think about what things you consider to be sacred, or want your kids to treat as if they are, and then figure out if you're doing enough to actually convey that to them without them actually believing that anything could be sacred. Because even if you tossed the supernatural beliefs, I'm guessing you do still have some emotional wiring that does treat certain things as sacred.
It feels like your main objections to modern society are sort of... buildings are ugly and people are mean and stupid on social media?
To me, those are both symptoms of modern hyper-capitalism. That is what defines the systems and structures that decide what gets built and what the algorithms reward.
I'm sure others will disagree with me as to how much capitalism is to blame there, but it always seems insane to me that it's not even an object of consideration when people talk about the ills of the modern world.
It defines so much of how society and culture and our daily lives are shaped these days, how can it possibly not be even a *consideration* when diagnosing broad-scale problems with the entire society?
I agree capitalism destroys beauty but in fairness I should point out that marxists like Adorno were highly influential in promoting ugliness in the arts.
It's also how people act, in person, in day to day life. And the justifications they give for what they do, and how those justifications are received by the people around them.
As a convert from atheism to Catholicism, I also think the "cultural Christian" argument falls short.
I agree (and agreed as an atheist) you can't build a firm foundation on pretending to believe something you think is false. And it doesn't work from the Christian side either—the claim of the Church is not that adopting parts of the faith is a lifehack like bulletproof coffee: it's a relationship with a real Person, and can't be instrumentalized.
The logical thing to do if you think that Christianity is a flawed progenitor of a culture you like is to get curious about why and try to engineer a better one.
And if you can't, there's room to be a little curious to see why Christianity might be, in GK Chesterton's words "a truth-telling thing" but you only become a Christian if that curiosity leads you to believe it works *because* it is true, not because it approximates the truth with some fanciful embroidery.
"It can't be instrumentalized" is too strong of a claim. If nothing else, following Catholic sexual teaching is pretty much a foolproof way avoid dying of syphilis.
We don't make specific claims about Catholicism having material benefits (it's a *cross* we're called to take up, after all) but it pretty obviously does.
I think this misses the subtext of the Cultural Christianity position. The REAL thrust of the position is the feeling that the masses are doomed to be stupid, unable to have intelligent, individual evaluations of value, cannot be educated, and (if you're a "Tech-Rightist") that they ought to be allowed to indulge their petty prejudices and entitlement to have their values reflected back at them from everything that they see.
I think the obvious rejoinder is, 'But you were the reason it all went to shit. You were. You can't complain it all inevitably goes to shit when you are sitting there with a wrench gumming up the entire machine. If we get rid of your apostasy, we get rid of the rot at the center of the apple, and then we can have All The Nice Things back.'
Whether we have reason to believe that's true is another story.
>And like everyone else in this category, I'm anti-woke. I do hope the worst is over, but I have continued nightmares about what would have happened if the DEI world had done a better job exploiting the post-George Floyd moment and cemented its advantage forever.
This is such a weird statement to me. Are we really still acting like there was some woke totalitarianism that we narrowly averted rather than having gone through an "anti-woke" moral panic in reaction to excessive virtue signalling? The woke menace was always just some HR officials getting over their skis and then getting smacked down by the actual powers that be.
It is possible the threat was exaggerated, but I still don't see it as less than the counter reaction, so calling it an obvious moral panic seems begging the question.
> The woke menace was always just some HR officials getting over their skis and then getting smacked down by the actual powers that be.
Your non-cancelled privilege is showing.
I want to pass along a great statement I once used in a talk to a group of religious psychologists. It's attributed to several British statesmen, most commonly Churchill, but no matter who said it, it's good. "I consider myself a supporter of the church, but I support it from the outside, a flying buttress."
Damn, blogging about atheism vs religion, what is this 2003?
It's pretty surprising and disappointing to me that the guy who wrote the Parable of Lightning can write off "This requires society enshrining a false belief as official dogma" as a boring aesthetic quibble that nobody needs to worry much about.
I don't see him as writing it off: it seems clear to me that even if his second objection was somehow solved, he still wouldn't believe things he knows are false. I think he was sarcastically referring how to other people such things don't seem to matter much.
Yeah that could be.
Keeping your house in good condition takes constant work against the forces of entropy, and there's no guarantee against disaster. You could still get hit by an earthquake or wildfire and lose it. But, if you want to keep your house a little bit on fire because you enjoy the warmth and pretty light, you are basically guaranteed to lose it because you're already well into an ongoing disaster.
Christianity CAN devolve into postmodernism, but modernism is basically guaranteed to do so.
As far as truth goes, the concept that culture embodies deeply valuable lessons about how best to build up a beautiful society doesn't require people to present it as True. Presenting it as true may be more durable. It's fully compatible with evolution, I think even more so than naive social Darwinism
This was a core argument or choice of Peterson, who called giving an opinion on whether God is real or not a trap. He says he now does believe in God but as far as I know doesn't also endorse Christianity as a comprehensive Truth
I think this can be compared to a dam. A majestic structure prevented or lessened floods for millenia. People always had fantastical beliefs about it. When people stopped having fantastical beliefs, they also tore down the actual thing. Big floods returned
I would also feel uncomfortable endorsing atheism as a literal and sure truth if I thought it was culturally valuable. A core parameter of science is that it can't observe anything extraneous to this universe. It's not possible to know there is no divine element to reality. And reality seems so unlikely that apparently the only two possible beliefs are some kind of design or infinite multiverses where the parameters that allow a stable universe where life can exist are statistically likely to exist
What this leads to for me is a sort of Pascal's cat. Life may be imbued with divine meaning or not. And then, not only do we not know, if you allow the thought that it could be, it seems to cast a warm shadow on the "not" possibility. If I accept that life may have a divine element, I also feel that, if it doesn't, why should that mean that it can't have its own self imbuement of life and meaning?
The common thread among all the religions that 'soften', is that it occurs once they move out of the desert which had 'hardened them' with 'hardship'.
Hardship leads to orthodox religions. Once you remove the hardship, they 'soften' their stance and become 'modern'.
In history this was covered some by Peter Turchin.
In Fiction, this was main point in the sequels to 'Dune'. The Fremen were bad-ass when they lived in the desert, but when they conquered the universe and converted Dune to have water, they 'modernized' and became soft, and the earlier generations looked down on the later generations as loosing their edge.
There is no solution, because if society does gain technology, and life becomes easier, then the religion will also change, soften, become 'modern'.
Until later, as Peter Turchin describes, this leads to collapse, war, and hardship --> And thus the cycle begins again, with new 'hardship'.
Nationalism has been an oddly virulent ideology that all other ideologies/religions failed to take down
The observation is really interesting; I don't think we really understand why society recently lost its religion. I think a major factor is that before 1800 something like 30% of children died before 5, worldwide, throughout history.
Mammals are designed for childcare, and humans have especially intense/prolonged parental duties, requiring profound neurobehavioral adaptations. In that context, the loss of a child is understandably horrific even without using our empathy. Religion offers a crucial emotional buttress in that context.
"the challenge of modernity" covers over the mechanism of action -- it was the pressure to open capitalist markets and create market societies which ultimately undermined every one of the human communities mentioned in this piece, whether Christian or not. The culture of modernity is the feverish dreams hallucinated by the human animal under conditions of capitalism.
Is it not true that capitalism is a rather Christian invention, specifically of Anglo-American origin?
Histories of capitalism frequently cite the English East India Company as the earliest joint-stock company — where shareholders could transfer their shares without affecting the operation of the company — to the late 16th Century under the reign Elizabeth I. But examples of joint-stock companies predate this example a bit in central Europe.
Not to mention the fact that the things that most liberals value, political and economic freedoms, freedom of speech, freedom of association, etc. were all pried out of the hands of repressive, theocratic institutions. The Enlightenment occurred in large part despite the state of Christianity at the time. There was a strong reaction against the wars of religion that were likely the most devastating man-made event to occur in Europe at the time. Those areas that went on to found secular governments had been predominately Christian for nearly a millennium before they became secular. The fact that the Enlightenment occurred in these areas is more of a proof that secularism will out rather than Christianity is vital for allowing it to happen.
>The fact that the Enlightenment occurred in these areas is more of a proof that secularism will out rather than Christianity is vital for allowing it to happen.
Then why didn't it happen in any non-Christian society? Why wasn't "secularism will out" true of any other kind of culture?
The argument here seems to be "all cultures move towards modernism, so it's not worth it to try to change culture in positive ways." That doesn't seem right!
I feel like this problem is already solved and we're actually just trying to figure out implementation/optics. Nearly every smart person I observe who has absorbed the threat of woke (it being a family member of the genus 'murderous ressentiment') espouses the same general principles that can only unfold in one way, practically. Assuming AI doesn't institute Gay Space Communism which is honestly the more likely solution rn, we'll get *slightly gay space classicism*, which is just moderate racism/sexism for disillusioned libertarians (whether left or right coded). If society just titrates towards 50% more egoism and materialist suspicion of Big Ideas (which is the rightful end-state of postmodernism), you get defacto classicism: mixed economy republic where people expect not to be meddled with, to be directly bribed off with large infrastructure/state programs that actually work, and to have access to slightly exploitative relationships like prostitution, less unionized labor, and a police force that effectively targets undesirables. Power and social stratification comes out from behind the curtain when people get burnt out on ideology and demand results. The gods (various competing states/classes) are indifferent, fallible, pluralistic/stratified, and beautiful, and that's taken for granted in a disillusioned person. This stands in opposition to the dream of (state) monotheism, which is totalitarian, infallible, and uncompromisingly unified in its notion of 'the good' and its indivisible 'humanity'.
> If modern atheists want a society better than our current one (or rather, better than wherever modern culture is leading us) they'll have to invent some new cultural package that's never been seen before.
I have believed this for a long time, and I'm working on it. See www.sevensecularsermons.org
I think the response is supposed to be that Christianity gave rise to modernism, but the bundle of "Christianity plus the belief that Christian culture is important and we shouldn't give it up because if we did we would get modernism" might not give rise to modernism.
> I hate asserting false things, even if they're "practical". I don't ask anyone else to share that particular quirk.
I don't understand the treatment of telling the truth as an arbitrary preference with no moral value. Doesn't it make the world easier for everyone to navigate if people tell the truth? Yashua Mounk has decried the Democrats tendency to tell polite lies over uncomfortable truths. It seems to me that wokeness is this tendency transformed into a cultural norm and then spiraling out of control - people believe some of the polite lies and then concoct more in order to protect the ones they believe. Personally, I encourage everyone to tell the truth, maybe not always but as often as possible
I think arguments about whether or not cultural Christianity is good are basically moot, because it's fundamentally not viable. You can't turn back the clock on the generational religious decay process past a certain point, because:
-You can have an 'X club' that's mostly people who believe in X.
-You can have an 'X club' that's half people who believe in X and half people who like the vibes of X and are willing to pretend.
-You can even, for a little while, have an 'X club' that has few remaining who believe in X and mostly vibes-based pretenders who passively fool each other, but...
- You *can't* have an 'X club' once everybody realises everyone else was pretending. However much you may want the vibes, the impression (accurate or not) that a strong core of people actually believes in X is load-bearing, and without it people inevitably drift away to other things.
We are no further than level three, at least in the US.
True, and I admit I'm writing from the UK which is pretty robustly in stage 4 by now. However, I don't think the long-term prospects in the US are great either, because 3 is likely to decay to 4 over time. It's difficult to imagine the US becoming as irreligious as Europe (and it may well not) because public displays of religious zeal remain so common, but it seems to me (as someone who's exposed to a lot of US culture involuntarily) that most religion in the US is to some degree politicised, and politicised religion is a great cover to hide the erosion of real belief (see Ireland, which was anomalously religious for western Europe in 1990, in a way that was obviously tied up with politics, but by 2020 had decayed remarkably quickly towards the baseline).
Whether that happens or not remains to be seen, but your involuntary exposure--whether that's Hollywood, journalism, or advertising--is quite unlikely to be an accurate reflection.
I think you’re missing a critical point here. The birth rate difference between conservatives and liberals in the U.S. is huge, about double for conservatives. In the UK, there’s almost no difference. Demographics will slow down or even reverse the decline of religion in America. Also, immigration to the U.S. from Latin America is religiously Christian, while immigration to the UK is secular or Muslim, neither of which will improve the state of Christianity.
That is a fair point - I guess we'll just have to wait and see.
I was once a member of a Unitarian Universalist 'church'. (Or more accurately I was a member of the choir... whatever.) UU maintains the vibes of Christianity - Sunday morning services in a church looking building, with music, recited prayers, a sermon, and socializing after. However, I attended service one Easter Sunday and the preacher said there was no life after death. On Easter. Or as some people call it, "Resurrection Sunday." So not a Christian group. There's some talk about Jesus but similar amounts of other religious leaders. I'll buy that it might be difficult to have an X club that maintains the vibes of X without most people believing in X, but it is possible to create a Y club that has all your favorite parts of X but instead of teaching kids that they should wait till marriage for sex and are dirty and compromised if they don't you give them honest and accurate information about sexuality. Maybe we should do more of this.
My impression is that stuff like UU exists chiefly as an off-ramp for people raised in more traditional religion without much of a long term future, but I could be wrong, especially given how hungry for IRL community people are these days.
Maybe you can't go back just one step along the ratchet. But if all the people who think that "everyone else was pretending" leave the club, and the only remaining (regular) attendees and (younger) clergy are the small minority of people who actually believe, then it seems you might go back to a (significantly smaller) church consisting of those people who actually believe in X. This requires the crisis to occur sometime before the church in question is completely hollowed out of belief, but that doesn't seem unrealistic in e.g. the context of the UK. (I'm currently attending a Church of England congregation where it seems pretty clear that all the clergy truly believe, though perhaps not every person in the congregation.)
Of course, what's left won't be cultural Christianity, it will be some form of actual Christianity, so this isn't an argument against your "moot" claim, but it semes that that the social phenomenon you mention is compatible with a cyclic behavior, and not just inevitable decay once you reach step 3.
I'm confused. You don't seem to make an argument.
Christians (C) are claiming that Christianity leads to the atheistism (A) you like, and that eventually this atheistism degenerates into wokeness (W). So they say, if you want A (and not W) support us in making C. Your "counter" argument is that eventually C decays to W. This argument doesn't counter anything?!
If you buy their premise, then you should make as much C and A as possible. This conclusion follows as you are primarily interested in A, but C is preferable over W, and so you should mildly support C when it doesn't conflict with A.
This type of argument could only conflict with A. It won't conflict with W at all, because arguments of the form C will lead to A, will lead to W, and W is bad obviously won't resonate with people who think W is good. Therefore it can only resonate with either A or C, and is only relevant to these two types of people.
Furthermore, if one believes in A, and doesn't believe in W, then one obviously doesn't believe that A necessarily leads to W. Therefore, one could never believe in "if you want A(not W) support us in making C".
Finally, I think concerns over W are vastly overblown on Substack
> The challenge of modernity has felled both Christian theocracies and the virtuous liberalisms of the past alike.
What virtuous liberalisms are we talking about? Scott mentioned that he has a nostalgia for fin de siècle culture. This was when, in certain parts of America, a black man could be hung for the rumor that he looked at a white woman the wrong way. This was when women did not have the franchise, and suffragettes were beaten, imprisoned, and force-fed when they went on hunger strikes. This is when the Catholic Church exploited the labor of unwed mothers in the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland and in similar institutions in Canada, Australia, and the US, and when children were abused and murdered in the Church's "charitable" institutions. This is when wealthy capitalist oligarchs forced factory workers to work 12-hour days six days a week for a pittance. Fine, maybe the architecture was a bit prettier, but academic art had reached its nadir. Empires were rotting from within. It was a house of cards waiting to collapse. Of course, after the old order collapsed, the atheists started grand genocides in pursuit of their political and ethnic utopias. Liberal democracy didn't really have a chance until the latter 20th Century.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali seems even more confused...
> Western civilisation is under threat from three different but related forces: the resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilise a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.
Western civilization has always been under threat since Prince Ballomar crossed the Danube and drove the Romans back to the Alps devastating Pannonia Superior, Inferior, Noricum, and Raetia (most of modern Austria, Hungary, and Bavaria). But I'd say the threats now are milder than they were when the Ottomans arrived at the gates of Vienna. Of course, she displays the reactionary fear of Woke ideology. Give it a break, Ali!
https://unherd.com/2023/11/why-i-am-now-a-christian/
The whole Islamic threat to the west is so slight that we allow Muslim immigration.
> This is when the Catholic Church exploited the labor of unwed mothers in the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland and in similar institutions in Canada, Australia, and the US, and when children were abused and murdered in the Church's "charitable" institutions.
It would be interesting to actually do some numbers on that relative to other atrocities at the time. Sure it gets a lot of movies, documentaries and the Hollywood treatment, in a way that Epstein’s island does, or other religions do not. It’s all very strange.
> Empires were rotting from within. It was a house of cards waiting to collapse.
It’s hard to get counterfactual history right but the European empires were at their height, and the American empire in the ascendant. It was the European wars that put paid to that. Future societies will probably see this while era as an Anglo era anyway, Britain passing the Baton to the US.
My bad. I should have specified as to what contributes to rot from within. I was thinking of the moral decay of fin de siècle culture. I'm talking about the escapism, the extreme aestheticism of the times, the world-weariness, and their fashionable despair. It sapped their vital fluids, and isn't this the reason that civilizations decline? <I ask snarkishly>
But I'm not sure they were sitting pretty. They had a restless Working Class (wooed by the Communists and the Fascists) who ended up revolting in Russia (commie), Germany (commie), and later Italy (fascy) and Germany again (fascy). It took WWI to get the dominoes to fall, but they did. Queue the rise of the US as a superpower.
Also please note I'm doing my best to keep the Romans in the forefront of people's minds. Romans mentioned 44 times vs Greeks 30 times. Egypt 4 times. Go Rome!
Actually, I just finished S.M. Stirling's new novel _To Turn the Tide_. It's re-envisioning of DeCamp's _Lest Darkness Fall_. Time travelers stranded in Rome of 165 AD. It's a fun read.
> What virtuous liberalisms are we talking about?
I'd argue that it's about ideals. Societies where the worst injustices are places where the society falls short of its own ideals, and in which, when confronted with this, the society eventually changes and becomes more just and views this as being in accordance with its own ideals. As opposed to societies where the injustices are direct results of the ideals, or societies where the injustice is more important and the ideals quietly change to accommodate the injustice.
This critique does assume an independent standard of justice by which societies and their ideals can be judged, but then, in a way, that's an artifact of cultural Christianity.
This is a fun argument, but in my Scott's position might be easier to understand if his usage of "modernism" were fleshed out more precisely. As used here, it clearly stands in for an undesirable cultural end state, but it isn't clear what aspects of the broad term "modernism" are so objectionable.
Here is a generic definition from Wikipedia, which I found mostly unhelpful as a metaphor for "bad culture"":
"Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction, and subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, architecture, and social issues were all aspects of this movement. Modernism centered around beliefs in a "growing alienation" from prevailing "morality, optimism, and convention"[1] and a desire to change how "human beings in a society interact and live together".[2] "
"The modernist movement emerged during the late 19th century in response to significant changes in Western culture, including secularization and the growing influence of science. It is characterized by a self-conscious rejection of tradition and the search for newer means of cultural expression. Modernism was influenced by widespread technological innovation, industrialization, and urbanization, as well as the cultural and geopolitical shifts that occurred after World War I.[3] Artistic movements and techniques associated with modernism include abstract art, literary stream-of-consciousness, cinematic montage, musical atonality and twelve-tonality, modernist architecture, and urban planning.[4]"
I'm fairly boggled by your historical impression of the 1880s/90s.
"wasn't very religious", say what now? There were no societies of any size on this planet in 1890 that even _tolerated_ atheism socially or legally, let alone in which being secular was the norm across a sizeable swath of the population. (Nietzsche was, to say the least, not even vaguely typical of most people's beliefs or assumptions during his lifetime.)
"economic liberty", I mean....if you lived in certain countries, and/or hadn't been born into the "wrong" race or religion or class for wherever you were, sure. Otherwise not so much! Only tiny slices of the millions living in Asia or the Russian Empire or Africa or South America enjoyed any meaningful economic liberty as of 1900. Nor of course did black-skinned people in North or South America, Jews anywhere east of Germany, etc.
"progressophilia", again, yes in certain places. But very much not in other places and those covered _much_ larger swaths of the world. Unless maybe we're taking a reeeeally relativistic view of what counted as "progressivism". (E.g. sure the Kaiser's Germany was in some ways relatively progressive and is described that way in histories of the period -- but "relatively" is doing a whole lot of heavy lifting in that assessment!) Large sections even of Europe and the United States were not as of 1900 adopting anything resembling progressive values.
Also, regarding that "20th century cultural package of wokeness and postmodernism (and fascism, socialism, New Dealism, etc)" -- if that's how you view it then perhaps worth pondering which period of history spawned the instigators and builders of all of those movements/ideologies. Stalin and all the members of his politburos, Hitler and all his associates, FDR and all his cabinet members, Mussolini and Franco and their followers, Mao and all his associates, Japan's 1930s leaders, a whole generation of South/Central American tyrants like Trujillo and the Somozas and Pinochet, etc. They grew up during the 1880s through 1900s, every one of those named and plenty more. Does it still seem desirable to want back a period which spawned _that_?
If you apply the criteria you are applying here to the modern world - then the modern world comes out nearly as bad. The post is really about the narrow West - in many ways the Anglosphere. Which is fine in an American blog.
Heh, I assume your first sentence is tongue in cheek.
No. The modern world isn’t the west. The Weird people of the west are a minority. There is little or no economic liberty or freedom of thought in the world right now in the very areas you talk about there.
They might be a minority, sure, but they're the ones that actually matter, the ones that have power, the ones that actually have a future.
Ah. So not joking, but also nonresponsive to what it is replying to and hence nonserious.
It's easy to forget sometimes that ACX is actually part of the broader online realm and so discourse here will sometimes descend into internetting. Well at least the mute function still exists so, bye.
According to Wikipedia the "Golden Age of Freethought" spanned the years from 1875 to 1914, so I don't think the society of the 1880's and 1890s was quite as hostile to unbelief as you make it sound.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Age_of_Freethought
To be sure there is a difference between being a crusader for a minority position and actually dominating the culture, but I think it is far to say that somebody like Robert G. Ingersoll was "tolerated" given that he was able to give numerous public speeches in favor of his agnostic views.
A Wikipedia article. Heh
Don't wait. Avoid the rush and start learning the language of your ancestors today!
The argument made for cultural Christianity in this post are
1. That it's false, and asserting false things is bad, even if it leads to good outcomes
2. Christianity eventually fell apart as a cultural package, and would again
I think these can easily be combined into one argument. If you believe that Christianity is now much weaker in the West than it was in the past, surely at least part of the reason is that novel theories in science contradict some stories described in the Bible, e.g, Darwinian evolution contradicting the story of Genesis.
Furthermore, I find the clash of civilizations argument, as pursued by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, somewhat strange. I'm going based on this article: https://unherd.com/2023/11/why-i-am-now-a-christian/
It's argued that first, institutions like "science, health, and learning" find their origins in a Christian world, as do "apparently secular freedoms - of the market, of conscience, and of the press". If it's too be accepted that all of these had origins in a Christian world, and I think this claim is probably debatable, then it still doesn't imply that one in the present day west should accept Christianity as the one true faith. Writers like G.K Chesterton and Tolstoy at least had the merit to reject the modern world in its entirety, to say that modern Western thought was built on medieval European thought, and modern Western thought is good, therefore we should reject it and return to medieval European thought feels ridiculous to me. It makes sense to say that modern Western thought is bad, therefore we should return to medieval European thought, but then I fail to see how you can package this into an argument against a traditionalist religion like Islam. It's possible that I'm misreading here, or that Ali's argument is a weak version of the right argument. To fully understand, I'll have to read Tom Holland's Dominion probably, which I don't think I have the time to do anytime soon.
Finally, there is the argument from meaning, which I don't think is relevant to this post, so I won't debate here.
What is the definition, the sine qua non, the heart, of a good civilization? That is what we are discussing , right?
"A good civilization is one where old men plant trees that they will never sit under."
I don't know the etymology of this quote, but it sums it up for me. If I can keep that principle in my mind and heart then I feel like I am on my way to being a good citizen. What rules I might have to follow while I'm at it is a more complicated question...obviously most people need to generally follow the rules in the culture they happen to find themselves in, or it won't do very well. If I can see obeying a rule, not as an infringement of my personal agency, but as a gift I am giving back to my civilization it makes it easier to obey it.
The Judeo-Christian structure is a good one; "Cultural Christianity" is a lousy name for its reinvention.
My solution:
The One Atom theory of the universe should be heavily promoted, and I am not joking. It is the quantum version of "We are one with God". I am not a physicist but I understand that this theory is not implausible. Wouldn't the deep knowing (because it is scientific) that we are all particles in one atom be powerfully uniting, in spite of all the nonsense we will engage in anyway?
> "A good civilization is one where old men plant trees that they will never sit under."
Oh, hey, I just did that 2 weeks ago!
What kind of tree?
White oak. About 8" tall.
How does it feel?
Also, I misspoke and the theory is called the Electron theory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe
It doesn’t really matter if it’s true or not because quantum physics generally is providing scientific proof for God. It’s not doing much good for the stories that we make up about God though. But isn’t that part of growing up?
I feel good about it. Like it has a good chance of still being there in 100 years, even if no one knows it was me.
I hope the tree feels good, too. It was rescued from the middle of a hedge, 1" from a curb, under some power lines, so it will hopefully have a much better life in its new home.
That's an interesting theory! It kind of reminds me of this, which I don't recall where I got from, so it might even have been from you:
https://galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html
No it wasn’t me.
It’s a beautiful thing to rescue an orphan tree. It inspires me. I need to plant some trees now that I’m getting to the point where I’m probably going to be lying under it if anything. 😆
There will be some corner of a domestic field that is forever Moon Moth.
Also planted some redbuds, but assuming they survive the deer, I'll be able to sit under them. :-)
Here in upstate New York, nothing survives the deer. Except the bears.
Christian culture without Christian doctrine would be what?
My first thought: Opening public meetings with a nondenominational prayer, baptisms and wedding and funerals and major holidays celebrated in churches even by people who didn't believe, Christian imagery in a lot of buildings and places, Christian names and institutions in important roles, etc. It seems like this is true in a lot of Europe. When I go to Belgium, there are tons of Catholic institutions, but when I go to Mass, I'm often in a church full of old people. (I recall completely surprising one of the nominally Catholic people I was visiting because I actually cared about not eating meat on Friday during Lent.) Many European countries have state churches supported by tax dollars, laws substantially influenced by religious teachings, even political parties associated with particular religions.
These places mostly don't seem to have gone woke, but I'm not sure I agree that they've avoided destructive post-Christian ideologies. And Christianity seems to have fared worse in Europe than it has in the US.
If this doesn't capture it, I guess I'm not quite clear what it means to embrace Christian culture without Christian belief.
I think there's an important difference between "proclaiming beliefs you think false" and "accepting some premises that aren't provable/disprovable because it seems to lead to a better life or society." I am not sure that the second one is the right thing to do, but it might be sensible, whereas the first one seems bad in general and also very hard to sustain.
If I think democracy is a terrible system of government that mostly leads to bad outcomes, but proclaim the greatness of democracy because the most successful societies so far have been democratic ones, I'm still going to be willing to discard democracy anytime I think it's in the way of a more important goal.
If I've accepted the premise (assuming it's not really workable to prove/disprove it) that democracy is the best system of government we humans know how to build, and proclaim that, I and everyone else in the same boat won't be generally willing to discard democracy as soon as there's something we want more, whether that's legalized gay marriage or a thousand-year reich.
No, no, obviously we need to return to a few centuries of deifying the Roman emperors, that will set us up nicely for a millennium of Christianity, after which we will hopefully have a few moments of nice things, until wokeness starts ruining everything by putting women in Star Wars again.
First, though, we need to have our republic collapse. :-/
Richard Dawkins has been calling himself a cultural Christian for decades and obviously doesn't think you should just disbelieve in private, so seems to me the premise of the article is wrong. What is Dawkins advocating for when he says he's a cultural Christian? I think that's much closer to what people mean when they advocate for cultural Christianity. Sure he's just one person but...he's Dawkins so...
I'm surprised that Scott wrote this whole thing without mentioning cultural Judaism as a point of comparison. There's plenty of Jews out there who go round identifying as "Jewish" and doing culturally Jewish things without actually believing in any of the religious stuff or obeying any of the inconvenient rules.
Cultural Christianity is about seeing that sort of thing and wanting to do it too.
So I think you misunderstand? Or I don't understand.
I don't believe in God, yet I try and live my life as if God exists.
(What God you ask. It doesn't matter everyone gets to pick their own God(s).)
And yes there is tradition. But God or religions change also. Gods are mostly good IMHO.
Liberalism.
Was it not second-temple Judaism which gave rise to Christianity which gave rise to modernism? And was it not the first Jewish diaspora which gave rise to second-temple Judaism? And was it not first-temple Judaism which gave rise to the first Jewish diaspora? And was it not Canaanite culture which gave rise to first-temple Judaism? And was it not the Ghassulian culture which gave rise to Canaanite culture? And was it not Besorian culture which gave rise to Ghassulian culture? And was it not Qatafian Culture which gave rise to Besorian culture? And wasn't it the Circum-Arabian Nomadic Pastoral Complex which gave rise to the Besorian culture? And wasn't that caused by a fusion between hunter gatherer and farming cultures? And is it not the case that the farmers there can trace their ancestry back to hunter-gatherers? And is it not the case that hunter-gatherers can trace their ancestry back to proto-humans? And would you disagree those proto-humans have ancestors which resemble apes more than man? *That* is the culture we should be emulating.
All of that is to say... we must RETVRN TO MONKE!!!!!
Maybe we can go back down to the chimpanzee-human split, and then follow the other path up to the bonobo route?
I want to believe that God is real and faith beneficial, but when I hear Sam Harris talk about this issues I can't rationally escape his arguments. So far, I didn't hear a good argument from a believer that tops Harris's atheist argument.
I’m with you on that. I think Christians wouldn’t be comfortable with the Christianity-as-a-means argument neither.
Valueless Postmodernism does not have the power to sustain a civilization over the long term. The postmodern society will possess the zombie corpse of The West until it finally collapses under the weight of its own absurdity and internal contradictions. Civilizations rise and fall, generally replaced by even better ones on a higher metaphysical plane. There is nothing to fear. As Herbert Butterfield said, historians do not spend much time mourning the fall of Rome. Stand up for the values that made The West great, and the future will be bright.
Instead of worrying we need to embrace falsehoods for the mysterious goods they produce, why not just solve the mystery of the good-fruit-from-bad-seed and then we can munchkin it and have 1,000x the goods at a fraction of the cost, and without all the epicycles, like we always do?
Postmodernism has sterilized the root from which it sprung. We might have lived on, sterile for some time, but *the world is coming*, our new neighbors are not sterile, and so, the next age, whether we choose to participate in it or not, is no more one of preservation by protection. That's over.
The new metamodern age is preservation by reproduction. We need beauty and truth to overflow their banks and become living springs, to push up in waves against other living springs that will drown us if we simply build a wall and pretend that will work as it did in the ole protection paradigm. "And He is the One Who merges the two bodies of water: one fresh and palatable and the other salty and bitter, placing between them a barrier they cannot cross." - Quran 25:53"
We have to be memetically what Abraham was genetically. If we can be convinced to kill our ideas because if we get asked "Why?" 10 times in a row, our recursive reasoning software crashes into existential despair...
If we can be convinced to kill our ideas because there's no ultimate justification for anything and besides, our ancestors were worse than their ancestors...
If we can be convinced to kill our ideas because The Best Lack All Conviction While the Worst Are Full of Passionate Intensity...
And it's not that we're just unwilling to fight and kill, (not without certainty, surely). It only comes to that in the first place because, long before, we were unwilling to live and face death. And it made our ideas and our arguments gentle and without force; forcefulness is a faux pas.
We are so greedy and ravaging against nature with our culture, we dare not be so also with our ideas. We came to violence so many times over ideas that got a little too powerful, a little too psychoactive. I mean, we're burning this guy at the stake because he agrees The Spirit emanates from The Father but doesn't agree it also emanates The Son. When did we gain the power to make shoggoths of gnats? (and why are we capitalizing everything?)
So we learned to believe, but not act like we believed, and Co-ExIsT-bumper-sticker together. And it worked wonderfully! We can prove it with numbers! We have slain the dragon of nature and gorged ourselves on verdant treasures like never before.
All the ideas lost their edge, though. Nobody kills for them, anymore, or wants to. Nobody dies for them, anymore, or dares to. "God" went from LSD to CBD.
Elsewhere, God is not dead, and the people he enlivens are not dead, and the ideas around his periphery occasionally crackle with excess power and explode; God's cup runneth over, and he has made the seas to teem with life, each after its kind.
Postmodernism stills, collapses all to flat, colorless "Truth". Metamodernism overflows with color and creation. It doesn't just pull itself together and decide to take desperate action, despite the lack of any true _reason_ to care, because the stakes are just that high. When the stakes are nothing, metamodernism still leans happily into action, no justification needed!
If you're free in the extreme case, you're free in the everyday. If you throw up your hands and say, "I don't know the ultimate answer, but I need to buy some food, for no reason", then you can throw up your hands and say, "I don't know the ultimate answer, but I'm not worried, for no reason."
The good news is, we can make multiculturalism work like never before. This time.
This time, we all share a lingua franca: online culture.
And we have too many neighbors to make enemies of all of them, so maybe we do none of them? Maybe we just copy how we act online. We can't go starting arguments with every person we disagree with; they're everywhere! Eventually, we stop starting them at all; that's what the other online veterans do. I mean, that actually goes double, what with AI and how it will soon terraform the internet. Obviously we don't want to be the fools arguing with the impiest of AIs all day; that's not the dominant internet culture.
In metamodernism, we stop looking for contradictions between our ideas, so we can use them as a crux to prove one wrong. That may have felt like proving our side right in the old days. In the new days, disproving any random religion or worldview wrong doesn't go *nearly* as far to proving your own; maybe it just proves some 3rd 4th or 5th idea is the right one!
In metamodernism, instead, we compete with color and creation. We show our ideas in their best form, we embody them as evidence of their efficacy! We shine and see who shines brightest! What are your contradictions to THAT!, when the contradiction=sterilization paradigm literally leads to extinction anyway, AND says it can't justify itself anyway, AND has a horrible time of it along the way, AND sees only the starkest reminders of horror in the finest displays of beauty.
So no. No thank you. No thank you, *sir*.
And who is truly the walking contradiction, the living being that uses reason to talk itself out of life, or the living being who uses reason to make enough beauty to fill the emptiness of postmodernism?
And if choosing life and love and beauty and truth and goodness is a contradiction, what if choosing death is also a contradiction? One strict catch, crossed with another, canceling both contradictions out.
So choose for yourself, if reason is confounded either way.
And if you look on life reasonless, does it mean life or death to you?
Love this, Hunter! Inspiring
Thank you, David! Please help however you can and let me know if I can help you!
I don’t fully grasp what you’re gesturing at here - too much overwrought prose at the expense of clarity - but what I can grasp, I appreciate. This is why the ACX comments are a unique delight.
"Underwrought", more like; I didn't have time to polish it
Please do feel free to ask questions or seek clarity!
Hello, David You are welcome Thanks for reading through. Just a brief reply to your points:
1.) Agreed. Jesus' teachings contain no such injunctions. But Christianity is also the sum of what it has done throughout history, the good and the bad. Ideals often get perverted. Look no further than Buddhism where a simple minimalist religion was turned into elaborate and ornate ritual.
2.) I fully agree here too. Voluntary charity is different from coercive redistribution, a difference Marxists don't care about. Additionally, in a certain light, Marxism promises a similar christian paradise but here on Earth, which was Marx's grouse with religion in the first place that he famously called the opium of the masses. He wanted the workers through communist revolution, without his input of course, to deliver the paradise of classlessness, et cetera here on Earth rather than turn the other cheek now and wait for some undefined reward in an unlikely heaven. This is the sentiment Che is echoing when he says those words.
3.) Yes, Christianity has often featured witch-hunts. It's a regrettable element. Shafarevich is also a lot more interesting and far simpler to read than Leslek Kolakowski, the other great historian cum critic of Marxism. I often find that scholars from Eastern Europe and Asia are more aware of the horror of Marxism, having lived through it and more likely to offer a penetrating analysis than western scholars whose own perceptions of the subject have been tainted by postmodernism, deconstruction, and other rather meaningless concepts.
Stay Cool.
Hello, David. You are welcome. Thanks for reading through. A brief reply to your statements:
1.) Agreed. Christ's words contain no such injunctions( Indeed, it often demonstrated a compassion for the sinful: eating with Zaccheus, the conversation with the woman by the well, the famous case of the adulterous woman). The rigidity of christian doctrine most likely begins with Paul who for all his contributions took things in a very different direction. But every religion is also the sum of the things they have done, both the good and the ill. Marxists plead innocence by trying to draw a line between their supposedly noble intentions and the misery the ideology has created. Courage demands christians don't do the same.
2.) Fully agreed. There's a massive difference between voluntary charity and coercive redistribution by a totalitarian state. Intriguingly, in a certain light, Marxism promises a similar paradise but here on Earth. This might explain Marx's grouse with religion which he famously called the opium of the masses. Marx wanted workers through communist revolution, without his sacrifice of course, to deliver the fantasy paradise of classlessness, etc rather than turn the other cheek now and wait for an unspecified reward in an unlikely heaven. When Che says those words, he's simply echoing the same sentiment.
3.) Yes, it's a regrettable side to Christianity. On another note, Shafarevich is deeply interesting and a lot more readable than Leslek Kolakowski, the other great historian cum critic of Marxism. I find scholars from Eastern Europe and Asia offer sharper analyses of socialism given that they not only lived through its horrors but unlike western intellectuals, their analysis isn't usually tainted with postmodernism, deconstruction, and other rather impotent concepts.
Stay Cool.
FWIW, I've been brainstorming a list of Christian Art from 1870-1930. Feel free to add to it.
Elgar - Dream of Gerontius, 1900
Widor - Mass, 1878
Faure - Requiem
Verdi, Requiem
Vaughan Williams - 5 Mystical Songs
& Fantasia on Christmas Carols
Parry - Jerusalem; I Was Glad; My Soul There is a Country
Whittier/Horder - Dear Lord and Father of Mankind
Bruckner, Tota Pulchra Es
Architecture:
Westminster Cathedral (built 1895-1905, not to be confused with Westminster Abbey)
Sagrada Familia, Barcelona, begun 1882
I was expecting this to be easy but actually it felt like slim pickings. Musically, a lot of important work was done in this period to preserve and edit older work so that it could be performed again e.g the monks of Solesmes published the first Liber Usualis in 1896 - basically a compendium of plainchant for the Catholic liturgy. And a lot of work was done collecting and transcribing folk songs including ye olde Christmas Carols. Carols from King's, that stalwart of Christmas Eve programming in the UK, began in 1880. Point being this era was responsible for more than original content.
Sacre Coeur, Paris
Atheists that adhere to Christian ethics? No thanks. Sounds like Europe.
If we combine Joe Henrich's "WEIRD" cultural evolution and adaptation, and Tom Holland's Dominion, we get some notion of the extent to which we swim in Christian waters, both in terms of unintended consequences and history of ideas and practices. Where would we be without the notions individual rights and of a secular sphere separate from the religious one?
Any society that can "honor its ancestors" - a quaint idea some cultures have - achieves some level of stability. A modern version of this would be to uphold those values and practices that demonstrably have resulted in social improvements and know where they came from. And to understand that the very institutions of self adjustment and critique that gave space for the woke notion that all good things have to come from deconstruction or elsewhere, are the ones we still need, but have lost trust in - in places.
I get that some who wish to find personal guidance in their lives look to the most proximal faith-tradition that provided it, and that it, for them, provides a foundation for the principles underlying Western societies. But those principles have already been secularized. While some live in tension - individual liberty vs. 'the meek shall inherit the world'-thinking, for example, maybe the service Cultural Christianity does to non-Christians, is to remind us that there are some good things in Western societies that can be honored without faith.
The key element for atheist ideology is surely the removal of a mythical all powerful omniscient patriarch who is used by rulers to justify their positions of power.
Absence of this paradigm and the hierarchical society that it engenders should be the foundation of an egalitarian society by default. What cultural specifics that comprises will vary according to each local culture and its specific needs
> Only 10% of Israeli Jews are ultra-Orthodox, and it would be lower if they didn't breed so fast.
Isn’t that percentage steadily growing? By outbreeding everyone else and having higher retention rates, those communities seem bound to succeed in bringing back the kind of society they want.
I agree it is not super strong, but its good enough to refute Right-wing Manichean-tinged critics of Liberalism like Deneen and Vermeule.
Here to disagree with "Only 10% of Israeli Jews are ultra-Orthodox, and it would be lower if they didn't breed so fast."
tl;dr - The idea that Jews as a whole move towards being more secular is primarily a diaspora phenomenon, seemingly not replicated in Israel, and secularization is at least much more than offset by differential birth rates, even outside the Hareidi (Ultra-Orthodox) world.
Clearly, the original proportion of ultra-Orthodox Jews was lower, not higher; in 1948, there were about 40,000, and by 1980, it was 4% of the population, ballooning to 14% today. That's definitely due to the birth rate, but it's also a testament to how few drop out - the decline in growth is due to the (slowly) declining birth rate. And more generally, the religious world in Israel hasn't been shrinking, unlike Christian groups which have declining religious affiliation; the less-than perfect fidelity to religious groups - https://www.taubcenter.org.il/en/research/are-israeli-jews-becoming-more-secular/ - is still very high, with 10-20% of Religious Zionist kids moving to secular schools, and a single digit percent of Hareidi kids moving out. (Also, people don't appreciate that "Religious-Zionist" is what would be considered solidly orthodox in the US, so it's probably more religious than most American modern orthodoxy.)
And my impression, for which I can't find data, is that Masorti populations are also growing, not shrinking, compared to decades ago. So across groups, the changes seem to be towards more religiosity, or at least the dropout is more than offset by higher fertility.
There seem to be too many unexamined assumptions when talking about the influence of Christianity. For example, people take it for granted that Christianity "civilized" Rome (some consider it a blessing, others consider it a fatal weakness), but maybe it was the other way round. Maybe being a minority had a humanizing effect on both Judaism and Christianity. If your religion rules the country, it is easy to focus on killing the infidels and heretics, but once you become an oppressed minority, many people suddenly discover the virtue of tolerance and not killing each other.
As many people have already mentioned, "belief in belief" is not the same as the belief proper. You won't convert someone to Christianity by telling them "actually, the story of Jesus was made up, but we should all pretend to believe it for political purposes". Even if the person agrees that this is a good political strategy, it makes Christianity "less sacred" in the sense that if you are going to promote the religion for instrumental purposes only, why not *improve* it? If Jesus is made up anyway, why not make them a black lesbian? More importantly, why not elect a black lesbian as a Pope?
By the way, is the "belief in belief" limited to the lay people, or is it also okay for an atheist to become a priest, or even a Pope? If they do, is it required that they at least pretend to believe, or should they say openly: "I am doing these silly things only because it is a politically approved tradition, no educated person actually believes this, right?" How much of the religious dogma is required for cultural Christianity? Should we drop the belief in Trinity? What else? Should we reduce the entire Christianity to: "be a good citizen, do not convert to any religion that doesn't call itself Christianity, and pretend that there is an afterlife that delivers some kind of justice even if everyone knows there is none"? (And how much would such belief in belief protect against e.g. Islam which offers an actual afterlife full of non-metaphorical sex slaves.)
>The challenge of modernity has felled both Christian theocracies and the virtuous liberalisms of the past alike. If modern atheists want a society better than our current one (or rather, better than wherever modern culture is leading us) they'll have to invent some new cultural package that's never been seen before.
I agree that something new is needed but I don’t think it will come as a result of intellectually driven cultural engineering. The challenge of modernity is it’s a vacuum for inspiration. Dire and unmistakable necessity has never been in shorter supply. The same is true of new frontiers—they’re virtually none within reach. This scarcity of obvious motivation makes us listless, bland and cynical about trivial things.
What’s probably needed now is a Winston Niles Rumfoord to ram fresh purpose down our throats, sparking an explosion of urgent and pertinent innovation that corresponds with a broadly shared vision.
Western societies have been secularizing at a steady pace for many decades now. There's no reason not to expect that to continue. Tying your ideas to religion is giving yourself albatross that will get heavier every year as more and more people view your ideas as medieval superstition. This problem is much graver when you look at the slice of the population with money and influence. Judges, bureaucrats, CEOs, movie producers, big tech oligarchs, etc. The Right's strategy over the last 20 years has been to target their message to the bottom 75% and then wonder why they keep losing.
But suppose a religious revival does occur. It's not entirely outside the realm of possibility. Who would people be turning to for religious guidance? In America, it would probably be the actual leaders of mainline Protestantism, evangelical Protestantism, or the Catholic Church. They're unlikely to turn to Pope-critical trad Catholic dissidents, Christian identity or Kinism, the Greek Orthodox Church, or whatever the new fad on the Online Right is.
Requiring a "guarantee he'll be re-elected" is a pretty high bar for deciding whether somebody represents a worrying development.
I wouldn't say Musk is far right (though I can see that my comment might have given that impression). But he is an unhinged, immature, loose cannon with lots of money and influence and I think if we're talking cultural decline, he's a bigger part of that than "wokeness".
Yeah, I guess some of my examples are from places that culturally don't have much in common with the USA, but (a) some of them *do* have cultural similarities that are probably relevant for the discussion (e.g. Western Europe) and (b) some of them have a big impact on the US culture wars themselves (e.g. Netanyahu).
https://youtu.be/yLhD6_8cobk?si=HrVdrA0laxEOjSxz
This is cultural christianity i can embrace.
Did you read 'The Diamond Age' by Neal Stephenson? The neo-Victorians seem like they would be right up your alley.
(They're not up mine.)
The problem isn't too little Christianity, it's too little actual liberalism.
I am still trying to understand if anything has changed at all or if the only difference is that now we have twitter.
If you have strong centralised and media who usually (but not always) favours loyalty over truth; then people who rise to positions of power will most likely be people favoured by some sufficiently large fraction of the media, or who have resources to essentially create their own parallel media of campaign ads and so on; and the best way for an elite to keep its friends in power is to promote credentialism and the bedrock of that is universities with opaque admissions and revered names.
Here's the thing: many government functions have always been incompetent or corrupt; elections have always had a tonne of dodgy stuff going on in them; there have always been unconstitutional court decisions; and university students have always been made fun of for being, as a group, the dumbest most-immature most-ill-informed yet-most-opinionated people in society when evaluated outside precisely the exams they sit (and also for generally, again as an aggregate, picking the worst regimes in the world who want to kill them as the objects of their wet dreams).
It definitely appeals to me to imagine that we're standing on the precipice of civilisation and waiting to see if we're going to fall over the edge; but I keep reminding myself of historical parallels for everything that's happening -- it's just that we're getting information and fact-checking (without loyalty to one or another section of the elite) in real-time from twitter. It's like how our view of the world suddenly darkened from 24hr global news, and suddenly we understood that more or less every day there's some catastrophic disaster. Now we have crowdsourced news and fact checking and understand that all of our institutions are horribly run and it is panic inducing.
I recommend Gad Saad's book "The Parasitic Mind".
He believes that all you need is a solid set of deontological values which most Western adults had (until recently) "stealing bad", "killing bad", "rape bad", "raping children very bad" and so on and so on; and also "objective truth is good" and "individual freedom is good".
He argues convincingly that the thing that has gone wrong (and he does think everything is going wrong) is that these values have been replaced by a nebulous consequentialism, and a different set of deontological values (essentially what woke people believe) that are antithetical to both logic, truth (truth being subject to emotions and subjectivity) and the values above. He thinks being against logic and truth is an important aspect of what is happening -- because he thinks holding some sacred view that is blatantly untrue means people get very good at double-think and effectively stop feeling any dissonance or guilt about believing things that are wrong; an example is scientific american the other day (being subject to much ridicule by saying) that differences in athletic performance between men and women are entirely attributed to cultural issues like rules around coaching, and there are no biological effects.
Final comment: the thing I find funny about the cultural Christianity argument is how Culturally Christian the woke stuff is in many ways: 1). the idolisation of poverty, and victimhood; 2). the demonisation of money, power, and resources; 3). the antisemitism; 4). the faith and trust placed in a select few, whose utterances should bypass any rational evaluation (whether it be judges, or whitelisted academics, or Fauci); 5). the conviction that you shouldn't listen or be exposed to views that disagree with the orthodoxy lest it infect you; 6). the separation between sex and love (but the view of sex as a degenerate and passing passion that was regrettably necessary but should be avoided for the most important people such as priests; morphed into the view that it was an essentially meaningless hobby, like playing checkers, that you should feel free to do in whatever manner you like and with as many people without experiencing any emotional or psychological or venereal problems as a result); 7). the best, most dedicated people don't have children.
Again, many some of these are universals. Maybe some are me being flippant or unfair. But it shouldn't surprise anyone that aspects of Christian culture live on strongly even in avowed atheists.
Indeed, in the Jewish context, the trend you describe of Orthodox=>Conservative=>Reform=>secular is not simply a lessening of their Jewish education into nothingness but also generally represents a replacement and assimilation of Jewish education by the dominant Christian-informed culture. Jewish friends who haven't received a Jewish education speak to me about Judaism in exactly the same way Christian friends do. That's because they've received the same background Christian-informed by-osmosis impression. Again, nothing about this should be surprising. Certain ideas and values and ways of thinking are just "in the water". I recommend the book Anti-Judaism by David Nirenberg for an entire book on how ideas about Jewishness have been "in the water" in the West or East.
8). valuing faith above reason (this specific aspect of traditional Christianity I think has huge consequences in how a bunch of things are viewed in the modern world). 9). paternalism: this overlaps a lot with a bunch of the previous ones but I think it's interesting in itself: most churches are separated between the lay people and clergy and the clergy have a privileged position not just in procedure but in knowledge -- indeed in Catholicism, by design, until recently, the lay people should not bee reading the Bible themselves but always have the information mediated to them. I often think of this when visiting my NHS doctor and not being allowed to see my test results or information they have, or even be told exactly what they're doing tests for. I'm not saying one causes the other but that there's a common culture here of paternalism where you have a privileged group watching over the scum like me.
"At least this is how it’s worked for Jews: the first generation (after immigration) are Orthodox, the second generation Conservative, the third generation Reform, and the fourth generation completely lose interest. If someone wanted to perpetuate Conservative Judaism forever, their best bet would be to support and promote Orthodoxy"
The claim about the first generation being Orthodox is not accurate. See:
"A common accusation that a Haredi debater levels at his non-religious counterpart is that while both their grandfathers or great-grandfathers were observant Jews, the non-religious person has severed the chain of a generations-long Jewish tradition. When non-observant Jews who are not versed in Jewish history gaze at old family portraits, they usually see men in dark suits wearing hats, some sporting a short or a long beard, and women in modest dresses, some with their hair covered. On the strength of their ancestors’ old-fashioned appearance, and unaware that this was the dress code in former generations for Jews and non-Jews alike, these non-observant Jews conclude that their forefathers were observant, and that the Haredi debater has made a valid point. This, however, is not the case."
https://jcpa.org/article/post-truth-politics-and-invented-traditions-the-case-of-the-haredi-society-in-israel/
Agree with all that.
I also sense confusedly that the decay had something to do with "modes of production", which in turn had something to do with technology. Without going all Marx, almost two hundred years too late, it seems that the traditional Christian order was doomed by the steam engine and mass production, if it hadn't been doomed by the spirit of questioning of the preceding century. It just took a while.
We're not quite past that stage - "things" are still being mass-produced in factories, using lots of energy as input - but with wealth being increasingly concentrated at the top, UBI has become a mainstream idea. If we have a society that will keep many of us alive but not gainfully employed, surely the future "cultural package" will need to take this into account?
Doctor: "I'm sorry, but you have cancer. It is fatal if untreated but there are options, and I recommend improving your diet."
Half your commenters, the patient: "WHAT? I'm in the best shape of my life! Prime age. Certainly better than when I had that bout of rheumatism a decade ago... Anyways, going back to eating whatever I want and thinking that nothing matters because my health will continue to improve. That's just the natural order, you know. Line go up!"
The latter-day-saints essentially believe in sim theory. They believe we are in training here on earth to progress to be as loving as Christ.
They use modern day prophets to keep things relevant and have shared secret rituals, beautiful art, music and architecture along with a high birth rate.
They're very pro scientific advancement for obvious reasons as well.
Christianity is mostly stable and takes centuries to devolve into Liberal Atheism
Liberal Atheism is mostly unstable and takes decades to devolve into woke progressivism.
Trying to reverse either takes work, but if you try to maintain Christianity then each unit of labor goes ten times further: you are a salmon swimming upstream (which they do all the time). If you try to maintain Liberal Atheism you are a salmon swimming up a waterfall. Maybe possible, but if you stop there and don't keep going you're immediately going to fall back down.
This seems to be a generic problem of societies. Otto von Bismarck: “The first generation earns the money, the second manages the wealth, the third studies art history, and the fourth degenerates completely“.
This is where the philosophies of Integral and Spiral Dynamics, I think, get it right: these shifts are an inevitable part of the evolution of human culture and consciousness. We can, of course, try to include good pieces from all these stages (i.e. certain morals that are rooted in conservative religions) and carry them forward. But it's a category mistake to imagine that we could somehow go back to a prior time. As you noted, across all countries and religions, the same story plays out. We have to chart a new path forward and accept that we can't go back.
I'm a non-cultural Christian, and I've thought about this same issue.
On the one hand, yes, Christianity is unstable, and this is inherent, because it's full of choices, and built in from the Garden of Eden story is the assurance that sometimes people will make the wrong decisions. (Judaism, sharing this, has the same apparent vulnerability.) Almost every Christian denomination invites you to choose Christ (I don't know how Calvinists reconcile this; I've never thought of that question before). Even when all of your culture is Christian -- medieval Europe -- you can quiet-quit. And medieval Europe gave birth to, well, us.
If every human being on the planet were 100% devout Christian, or 100% devout Jewish, this would cease to be true with the very next generation. "Choose ye this day whom ye shall serve."
And so here we are.
On the other hand, consider the alternative. We could have a belief system that requires you not to leave: Islamism, Communism, facism. I hope none of us here wants *that*.
So, yes, it's always falling apart. And reviving. And falling apart again. And while it's doing it, we get the same awful things you can find in many civilizations (you can make a list) but also tremendous new inventions, like science, the abolition of slavery even for people in your out-group, human rights, and "render unto Caesar." Even if Christianity/Judaism are always falling apart and losing members and getting us here, here isn't so bad. Compare it to PDRK, Saudi, the old USSR, or everything that came before.
As for what we could do to make being pulled downstream less quick, I'm still thinking about that one.
Camille Paglia (atheist) on this:
[In class] I thought I was feeling something something's wrong, I could tell I wasn't communicating and I didn't know what why, and it suddenly hit me to my heart: they did not recognize the name Moses. ... Secular humanism is a big bust ... if you take religion away and the politics becomes a religion okay Dogma becomes becomes a religion and that's what's happened. All these enlightened parents want to to raise their children without any you know religious uh contact and the end result is inability to recognize the great myths, the great Stories, the great Legends of the West.
Then she goes on to tell a similar instance in which she's getting that the students don't recognize the name "Hitler."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJMD2rBuZtE
The Christianity Big Lie is: God exists and cares about you.
The Modernity Big Lie is: All people are “equal”.
Scott rejects the Christianity Big Lie, in spite of what flows from it; but defends (or atleast goes along with) the Modernity Big Lie.
The problem with Scott’s analysis is the existence and importance of Luxury Beliefs and Luxury Attitudes. The reason these are an issue is that we are not all the same…
To take just one example, skepticism is a fine virtue — in people who care about the truth in a particular field, and have some skill in understanding that field. Generic skepticism in the entire population is not quite such a virtue. Same for, eg, cynicism. I could give many more such examples but space is limited.
So what do we do about this? History, from at least the time of the Gracchi shows us that there is both a demand in the lower classes for claims that destroy society, and a willingness of some in the upper classes to provide such claims and feed the resulting fires. Bottom line is you can’t just say “The root beliefs of Christianity are icky, therefore I will build my utopia without such beliefs” given actually existing humanity and the fact that plenty of them think differently from you.
In a perfect world, I think we want something like Brave New World, where alphas to epsilons all hold realistic views of their abilities and desires. In the absence of such, we need something get beta’s to accept that they should be explaining (but not designing) policy, and epsilons to accept that even if they don’t understand the details, policy is actually appropriate for them. And I don’t see Christianity as any worse than any other alternative for this.
Unless you actually believe the Modernist Big Lie, what’s your alternative? Where Christianity fell apart was not “in itself”, it was by allowing the transition to Modernism. As long as dangerous ideas were confined to discussion between smart elites, things were OK; the problem was allowing ideas to go wild into the population…
I don’t have great solutions for how to avoid this (and especially not how to get to there from here); certainly while we want an aristocracy, we can’t allow it to be based purely on birth (obviously that failed) or on credentials (obviously that is failing) so on what? ‘Accomplishment”, yes, but details???
This is all I have time to say on a huge subject, except to restate something I’ve said before: I believe that China understands this point, and that THIS drives their social media policies. The issue is not censorship, or the suppression of certain facts; it is ensuring that debate is held between sensible, intelligent, responsible people, to try to get at some sort of truth without surrendering to groupthink or mob mentality.
Maybe they will fail, but they seem at least more aware of the issue than the West, which seems to trying hard to prove Spengler and Nietzsche (albeit a century later) absolutely correct.
'You lost, ergo you are a loser' is a weak argument.
A Christian perspective: I think the pattern we see in history is divine intervention followed by its unfolding and then descent into decay. If Christendom was kicked off by the incarnation of God and his continued presence by the Holy Spirit, it is hard to see what the next intervention would look like. The visions and dreams non-Christians in various parts of the globe are having of Jesus doesn't quite seem to fit the bill. Perhaps it is Jesus' promised second coming, but if so there is a lot of prophesied nasty times that we will experience first.
I don't get this argument. Suppose somebody says, "If people stop exercising they get fat. People have stopped exercising, and they are now getting fat." If you respond, "Well, I don't think that works, because I don't like exercise, and if exercise was a panacea against fatness, nobody would end up fat," don't you get a funny look?
The argument goes, "If you stop being culturally Christian, you'll lose the good things from society." We're losing cultural Christianity, and we're losing the good things. And the post says, "Well, nah, if cultural Christianity holds off collapse, then there wouldn't be collapse." But that's skipping the step. The argument is that cultural Christianity leads to good things, not that it naturally compels allegiance so that people will always be culturally Christian.
cringe. dude 1890 was probably horrible if you're like gay, or psychotic, or haven't been rich. it wasn't a great time. now is. stop this nostalgia bs, it sounds like an autistic adult who doesn't get the young kinds and then using some fancy words and abstract theories to validate his missing understanding of a younger generation. it's fine, just trust it a little bit. your psychiatry stuff is really good man but i feel like every specialist with an audience starts to think of themselves as somekind of universal genius...
sorry i should have explained, i just read "wokeness and slave morality" like morality is either JUST about doing good things or just about not doing bad things. it's both obv, and boomers really dropped the ball on the second part of the equation for some time so a lot of pollution problems or colloquial hate speech have been kinda ok bc the focus was on progress, and now that it calibrates for a few years people are getting pissed because it may be uncomfortable to limit yourself here and there. is just egotistical to me. as if you wouldn't get credit for good things anymore??
1) I'd argue the world wars were the main reason the west lost confidence in itself and turned away from Christianity, and absent them it wouldn't have been replaced by the' 20th century cultural package of wokeness and postmodernism'
2) Cultural Christianity could be a bit like how Thomas Jefferson's view as expressed in his bible, that Jesus was a teacher and philosopher of note rather than the literal son of god. This would view him similar to how the Buddhists do the Buddha rather than how the Christian church does.
Much lower quality, much more emotion-driven, than your usual well-reasoned posts. The fact that you can be yelled at by people who disagree with you is not some decay of a liberalism that existed in the 1890s. White supremacists did a successful literal coup against the elected government of the largest city in North Carolina in 1898. People who publicly disagreed with white supremacist positions in the South were routinely assaulted or even murdered up through the 1960s. The NYT saying untrue things about you is a violation of any reasonable norms of civil debate, but it's not a violation of bedrock principles of classical liberalism, certainly not one on par with murdering political opponents and overthrowing a government.
I am a muslim
Can't we have a pleasant and coherent techno-optimism religion for the masses? Because it's really the masses that struggle when unmoored from a framework of meaning and purpose that religion creates.