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Good morning! Hope your week is off to a good start fellow Mottizens. I was tickled pink to find that the Motte just went through it's fourth birthday, apparently, and I strongly agree with nara that this place is one of the best, if not the best, places to find genuinely open political discourse on the internet.
Anyway, I want to talk about religion & modernity. The so-called 'RETVRN traditionalists' and neo-reactionaries, and how some insights from them play into the broader culture war. I was reading a post from a friend of mine on Substack, and he makes a great point with regard to religious folks trying to turn back the clock, so to speak:
I strongly agree that we live in a liberal time, and have deeply liberal instincts. We can't just pretend that we don't live our lives in a liberal way, and I suspect most people talking about a return to traditionalism are, as @2rafa has (perhaps uncharitably) opined on before, simply LARPers.
This relates to the culture war for the simply fact that I think just like the religious piece, most conservatives that ostensibly want to tear down the liberal establishment, actually don't want to give up their liberal freedom and personal autonomy. It's all well and good to make arguments about tradition and the importance of paternal authority etc in the abstract, but personally submitting yourself to someone else's rule (in a very direct way, I understand that we are ruled indirectly now anyway) would, I suspect, be a bridge too far.
In addition though, I simply think that modern liberty is good. I'm a sort of reluctant conservative I'll admit, but even in the traditional conservative picture of the world, I think that personal freedoms from the state and even to a certain extent within traditional communities are great. To me, the project of the conservative in the modern world is not to sort of force us via governmental apparatus back into some halycon pre-modernity days. Instead, the conservative impulse should be focused towards explaining and convincing people in a deep and genuine way that living in a more traditional way is better for society, and better for people in particular.
Going off that last bit - once you get some years under your belt, it becomes clear from a personal standpoint that a more controlled lifestyle is just better. That saying that you have no head if you aren't a conservative in your 30s rings true in large part, in my humble opinion, because of this personal understanding. If you drink all the time, eat unhealthy food, smoke constantly, etc, you will very quickly find that your 'personal freedom' isn't worth much when you constantly feel terrible.
While convincing people may be much harder, I am convinced (heh) that it's the best way forward. As someone who changed my mind on the more traditional lifestyle largely through argumentation and personal experience, I am living proof that changing hearts and minds is possible on this front. Ultimately if conservatives try to force a return to pre-modern times, not only may we lose technological advances, we also don't even have the living traditional to fall back to anymore.
I won't deny that modern liberalism has a lot of flaws, especially when it comes to the religious context. However, as I've argued, going back seems foolish and not that desirable even if we could. I'll end this with a further quote from the article I quoted above, as I think it ends better than I could:
Edit: ended up writing this into a more full Substack post, if anyone is interested.
I agree that some things are never coming back. Believing in God just because, assenting to a teaching just because — that’s gone. Intelligent people need to be persuaded. They can be persuaded on rational, phenomenological, social, or utilitarian grounds. But the era of “here’s some Thomism”, “just trust the Bible”, “just trust me bro” — this is totally dead. Not a lot of serious people can take every teaching literally just because they have been told to do so.
If conservatives can be persuaded to join the army to help a Godless empire plant poppies to flood their rivals with heroin, then they can be persuaded to sacrifice some pleasure for the only Empire that has ever mattered, the Kingdom of God. What made them join the army? The unthinking intuition that they can find glory there, some benefits, some camaraderie, and someone told them that their enemy is satanic. Christianity can do all of this but better, in the right form. Not only can it induce stronger allegiance to a perceived Good, but the Good is actually Good.
I go back and forth in my mind debating how much the supernatural is required to promote ideal behavior. It’s worth noting that Marxism and Nazism were both able to promote ostensibly selfless collective behavior despite having no interest in the supernatural. As were the French revolutionaries, or even the soldiers under Napoleon, or the Kamikaze pilots of Japan. But why would someone give their life for communism? Because it was seen as utopian and just and a fight against evil, and men bonded fraternally over these conclusions. This made it morally obligatory and a great way to die. You had Japanese soldiers still fighting into the 60s after WWII ended, only for their emperor! So if people are willing to die for a cause that has no supernatural aspects, why shouldn’t they be willing to live selflessly for a Christ that has no supernatural aspects? It’s worthwhile to ponder this. If obedience to God can usher in utopia, God understood in a certain way which precludes the supernatural, then it can promote ideal selfless behaviors without veering into unevidenced supernatural assertions.
I think this has pretty much always been the case. Apologetics is a very old discipline for this reason.
This is underdiscussed (in part because of what those people did) but people absolutely are and this explains a lot of the last century and a half or so. Progressivism took some moral cues and language from Christianity but in practice was often essentially materialistic. I think this was truer in Europe than in the United States but as I understand it lot of mainline Protestantism was retreating from the supernatural and fiddling with cool new social causes to usher in a utopia as you say. Embarrassingly, those causes turned out to be things like "eugenics" and "banning alcohol" and a lot of the "progress" that was made was unwound and then memory-holed, but people are absolutely willing to live selflessly for a Christ with no supernatural aspects.
Part of the problem is that when you strip the supernatural aspects from Christ, there's not much left that isn't subject to radical reinterpretation (if you read the Gospels Christ arguably tends to rain on utopian parades in favor of, well, the supernatural gift of everlasting life). Hence the modern progressives are basically radically opposed to their forebears from 100 years ago even despite the much-remarked-upon resemblance of "woke progressivism" to a "secular" "religion" – the through-line is essentially the same. What's missing is consistency – progressivism has flitted from cause to cause and emphasis to emphasis from decade to decade. I don't think religions are free of this at all, but grounding the authority of a religion in a transcendent supernatural does provide a focal point for a religion to return to. Progressives of today can't return to the writings of their forebears from the 1880s or 1920s because those guys were all incredibly racist by today's standards and nobody – not even the authors – are claiming to be inspired.
Marxism comes the closest to this – and perhaps this explains its enduring power – because it claims to be a MATERIALISTIC SCIENCE and thus inevitable, which is a sneaky way of claiming to be infallible WITHOUT invoking the Divine.
You’re underestimating how easy it was to do apologetics before the Age of Enlightenment. There was a time when you could say, “consider the phoenix of Arabia, the bird which resurrects itself every 500 years, as proof of resurrection”, and people were like “oh yeah, I mean that’s a good argument, everyone knows about the phoenix”. This is an argument that Clement makes, one of our first apologists, repeated by Origen and others. (It also happens to be an interesting topic of debate regarding the right meaning of monogenes). Augustine makes a similar argument in regards to the Pelican, which everyone knows feeds its young from its own flesh. When Paul argued about the resurrection of the dead, he pointed out that the stars are spiritual bodies with their own glory, and as you know these were once especially righteous mortals —
The first apologist we have is Justin Martyr, a former philosopher who studied Platonism, and while he begins his Dialogue of Trypho entertaining the notion of philosophy, he quickly discards it as being worthless entirely, with only the Prophets having knowledge of the divine.
And this is the whole beginning of apology: a disinterest in philosophy in favor of prophecy. The early Christians were blessed that they could point to 500 years of writings predicting Christ; this would have constituted excellent evidence for men who believed in phoenixes and spiritual stars. And the secrecy of the faith made it even more compelling. But who would be convinced by this today? We are 2000 years removed. We need something else.
There are many changes that a Christian is supposed to effect in the world, however, from reducing sin to increasing love and brotherhood to sharing in wealth. This is the Kingdom on Earth, the Kingdom within us, the God who is love and so forth. Why should these need to be done with eternal life in mind? 20th century social movements are evidence against that. And I wonder how important eternal life really is for establishing moral behavior. Where are the people selling all they have to be perfect, for an even greater reward in the life to come? They are so rare as to be essentially nonexistent. I don’t mean the ones who get free room and board at a beautiful monastery, that’s different. If a religion like Catholicism with all the bells and smells cannot actually induce the rich to depart from their wealth when this would confer perfection, extra rewards, and possibly even sainthood, then eternal life is probably useless for motivating righteous conduct. It may be very useful as palliative care for those whose lives are utter torment, but then so can thankful and gratitude and some other practices.
Did most people know about the phoenix or was Clement – an educated philosopher – writing to other educated men about something that they would be familiar with through reading the elite texts of the day, such as Herodotus? I imagine it's difficult to know for certain, since illiterate people don't leave records of what they are and aren't familiar with, but an educated philosopher referencing a creature that was described by the elite educated classes of the era seems...well, similar to modern apologists who reference modern scientific or historical consensus when attempting to reach their audience.
So it is with the rest of your examples (although I would say that Paul predates Justin Martyr) – it's educated people writing to convince educated people, at least in part. (I would say that the actual track record of Christianity as regards philosophy is much more mixed than one of outright rejection, but I'm not sure if you want to go down that rabbit hole).
As I have pointed out before, modern Americans believe in stuff like poltergeists, so when you say "who would be convinced by this today" the answer as regards very specific cultural idioms like the phoenix is "not very many people" but substitute in something from our modern mythology (say – an argument for the resurrection of the dead based on the reality of ghosts) and a lot of people would probably nod along like "oh yeah, I mean that's a good argument, everybody knows ghosts are real."
And a number of other interesting arguments have been advanced in the intervening period – apologetics has hardly stood still. (I'll take this moment to note that a few weeks ago here on the Motte our peers were expressing a high degree of confidence that Jeffrey Epstein was assassinated based on, essentially, a single correct prediction by "the conspiracy theory crowd" that he would die in custody. If some Mottizens can find a single-point correct prediction so convincing – and I generally assume people on here are pretty smart by the standards of our day – then I find it hardly surprising that what you describe as 500 years of predictions of Christ suffice to convince people, whether today or in the 1st century.)
If you think the 20th century social movements were bad then I think it's not unreasonable to take it as evidence that doing social movements without eternal life in mind is a bad idea. (I think it's merely suggestive, not a necessary conclusion.)
Well it's interesting you say this, because while I understand the sentiment, it's directionally wrong. Perhaps it's true that visible displays of people giving all that they have to the poor are rare (but note that doing this is specifically condemned by Christianity, so it's not surprising that this is the case) but religious people are more generous than nonreligious people.
Sure, but the phoenix and the pelican in question are pretty crazy creatures to believe in. If they believed these creatures existed based on testimony, and believed it for centuries, then they had a default level of gullibility that has been lost since the advent of science. You can no longer say “this prophet says so” or “this magical creature shows that resurrection is possible” or “the Greek Oracles prophecied the coming of Christ” or “500 people say they saw resurrected Jesus” and expect smart people to believe it. Especially when they now have different competing faiths making claims of the exact same quality. If these intellectuals were so gullible, we can only imagine how gullible the common folk were.
If I were asked on a poll if I believe in ghosts there’s a fair chance I’d say yes for the hell of it. I don’t think smart people really believe in ghosts outside of tricks of the mind. I think if a smart American were consistently haunted by a ghost, he would book a visit with a psychiatrist. He probably wouldn’t be telling his coworkers about the ghost he hangs out with every night. Although maybe it would help on dating apps for picking up goth chicks.
No religion emphasizes eternal life more than Islam. Do you think their constant obsession with the rewards of the next life have aided their cooperation and virtue? I imagine not. I think the reason that the 20th century social movements failed is that the clung to the wrong moral focus. They missed the mark by a lot. They needed to focus on something which induces epistemic humility, local sphere of concern, and selflessness.
That’s tangential to my main point. I know religious people give more to charity. This is one of the reasons religion should never go away. (Although I find collection baskets extremely evil, subtly shaming the poor). If you believe that this life is not even 0.01% of your whole existence, and you can ensure the 99.99% of your life will be even better by selling everything to the poor, then what reasonable person wouldn’t do it? This is like Mr Beast giving you a contract saying, “sell everything, spend a week begging for alms, and I’ll give you 100 million dollars”. Everyone would do this, surely. So why aren’t any Christians doing the eternal cosmic 100% assured Mr Beast challenge? I know I would if I really believed it. And there are Hindus who do this with their gods and traditions! Do the Hindus have more faith in their demons than the Christian has faith in the True God? I would like to think that there’s something else at play here, a deeper psychology.
If I believed this, I would sell everything to go preach Christianity to Muslims in the most remote corners of the Middle East. If they kill me, it only expedites my paradise. But it’s a frankly unbelievable proposition, which is why no Christian sells all he has to go preach somewhere he knows he will be killed. It’s not because they’re cowards or anything, it’s just that the more reasonable part of them prevents their “put on social identity” from really believing in the claims. IMO.
The Phoenix is a little weird. The Pelican's not really weird at all; matriphagy is a real thing, it just happens that actual pelicans don't seem to practice it. The sexual parasitism practiced by the anglerfish is weirder than matriphagy in my mind, should I not believe in that?
This is absolutely not true, just in my personal experience. (Incidentally, did you know that increased education in the United States is correlated with increased levels of religious attendance?) But you don't have to believe in my experience: the educated class in the States takes stuff like poltergeists seriously enough that outlets like the New York Times write serious stories about exorcists. (To be fair, I am collapsing ghosts and demons into one category here, I suppose.)
Yes, absolutely. You can see this, for instance, in how the Taliban (religious zealots) outcompeted the nominally Islamic tribal grounds in Afghanistan and started cracking down on pederasty, which was traditionally practiced and accepted. Cooperation led to victory, and victory led to virtue.
Well, under certain circumstances Christianity actually condemns selling everything to the poor, so presumably that's at least part of the reason Christians don't do it. I cannot really speak to the Hindus.
This famously does happen, though! The last guy killed by the Sentinelese was a Christian missionary.
The other groups in Afghanistan were not nominally Islamic, they were all practicing Muslims. The Taliban succeeded not because of a belief in the afterlife, which is shared by all Afghans, but because they are an extremist brotherhood oriented around a moral ideal that they are constantly reinforcing to the exclusion of everything else literally all the time. The Bolsheviks had no belief in an afterlife, yet they completely defeated the Orthodox Christians who had such a belief. Same re the French revolutionaries. Did the Greeks and Romans lack courage in battle? Or the North Vietnamese, or the North Koreans? Or the Japanese — who fought more courageously than the Japanese? There’s no clear evidence that an afterlife is instrumental here.
I think “under certain circumstances Christianity actually condemns selling everything to the poor” is an enormous cop-out. But instead of getting into the weeds with whether poverty is literally a mark of perfection, I’ll say that I know a lot of Christians and they all enjoy your typical American consumer activity and wasteful purchases. I know one particularly prominent Catholic family and they have enormous mansions and nice cars. How is it that Warren Buffet lives more frugally than a major Catholic figure who sits in the front row at Papal visits? It can only be that they don’t genuinely believe in the rewards of heaven, which if believed would necessarily result in maximal charitable activity (certainly not mansions and luxury cars). At the very least, the threat of hell for being rich should be enough to get them to abstain from these sorts of purchases.
As a 1 in 200 million chance? It’s famously unusual.
God presumably knows you're rich whether or not you make ostentatious purchases. Certainly he knows that Warren Buffet is rich, that little house doesn't fool anyone. If you're going to hell for being rich, you may as well enjoy yourself before you go.
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I suppose this depends on who you ask but the Taliban seem to think that practicing pederasty is incompatible with correct Islamic practice.
There's very clear evidence that an afterlife is instrumental. You're shifting the standard to claiming that the belief in an afterlife will always and everywhere prevail. But remember, you said
And I would say – yes, clearly.
Why? Why shouldn't Christians be judged according to their own teachings? I don't even disagree with you that Christians often fall short of their own teachings – and it's fine to criticize that – but it's important to understand those teachings first. If Christianity specifically teaches that one's first duty is to one's family and dependents it is silly to criticize Christians with family and dependents for not impoverishing them to give to charity (see perhaps most notably 1 Timothy 5:8, which compares failing to provide for one's own house with apostasy!)
Now – I don't disagree with you that Christians often act as if they do not believe what they say that they do. I do this, to my shame. But – to your point about faith – the people in the first century whom you suggest had such an easy time believing in Christ ALSO did this! If your idea that belief is harder now is correct and that is why Christians today act as if they do not believe was right, we would expect the first century church not to have that issue. One need only read the writings of first century Christians to be disabused of that notion.
And today people do this in other areas quite frequently (for instance lots of people know that drinking is bad for them...), unfortunately. The fact that people today, or in the first century, act contrary to their own professed belief and knowledge has little bearing on the belief itself (alcohol IS bad for you even if you act as if it isn't!)
Well perhaps they are familiar enough with Catholic doctrine (as I think I am, although I am not Catholic) to know that that's not how salvation works in Catholic teaching.
The verse you are probably thinking of is as follows:
Not stated in the text here (even as a riddle or hyperbole): "rich people go to hell." Nor is that a teaching of Catholic doctrine as I understand it.
Now, it IS true that there's a certain tension in Christianity, especially early Christianity, with wealth (see for instance James 2, but note that James does not advocate for kicking the wealthy out of the church!) But on the flip side, I certainly can't think of any sort of general command in Christianity for people to sell all they have and give it to the poor (the instruction in Matthew 19 was to a specific individual – although quite arguably it applies more broadly! – and you can see in Acts 5:1 - 4 that even in the early church described in Acts 4 liquidation of wealth to give to those in need was entirely voluntary.)
I don't disagree that the very specific thing you said never happens is unusual. :)
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Efficient central planning.
Iron laws of history.
New Soviet Man.
Sluggish Schizophrenia.
Lysenkoism.
Sparrow Extermination.
Rape Culture.
Stereotype threat.
Growth Mindset.
Structural racism.
Gender Identity.
Masks stop the spread.
The wage gap.
The science of Criminal Rehabilitation.
How long do you think we could make this list if we actually tried to be rigorous about it?
No "default level of gullibility" was lost with the advent of science. The overwhelming majority of people do not understand science and do not base their beliefs on scientific rules. Not even the overwhelming majority of scientists do this. I am skeptical that even a slim majority of scientists do this even with regard to the science they themselves personally conduct.
For at least half of these, a scientist could point to real data, but they misinterpreted or fudged the data. That’s different than believing the claims of supernatural religion, which do not require a scientific intermediary for interpretation. Why would it be gullible to believe in “growth mindset” if there are studies on it, but then later studies disproved it? The issue here is that the common person is led to believe in the findings of popular science, because schools teach that.
If I make a claim like “prayer works” or “God does miracles”, even someone with a very low IQ can tell that prayer does not work as claimed, and that miracles appear to have stopped around the same time that scientific instruments and recording came along. The issue of superstition is an enormous stumbling block that prevents tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of people, from ever considering religious activity. Because they don’t like to be tricked. And trust in science similarly suffers when people realize they are tricked by science. But trust in reasoning doesn’t normally suffer.
For all of these, a human wrote symbols on a page, and then some other human read those symbols and assumed they accurately reflected ground truth. Coincidentally, I am pretty sure this is exactly how people came to believe in the phoenix. I do not see why I should consider the Phoenix as meaningfully more fantastical than the snail darter. Both are creatures that do not exist, whose salient properties are entirely fictitious.
Yes, because "studies" just reduces to "authorities said so", and who these authorities are and why they're considered authorities doesn't seem to ground out in any rigorous scientific process, now or ever. "Studies show" is an assumption of reliability, in the same way that people used to assume Plato or Aristotle or whoever were reliable. I see no evidence that it is any more rigorous that the authorities that preceded it. Sure, you can up the reliability by carving away the worst examples via arbitrary hindsight. And I can do the same for the ancients; I bet Pythagoras' math is pretty solid.
It appears to me that scientists also routinely believe the findings of popular science as well, for similar reasons. People trust authorities to be reliable, and the important word in "consensus reality" is consensus. Also, scientists remain people.
IIRC, we actually have records of first- and second-generation Christians writing about how miracles had dried up over the course of their lifetime, and the bible itself records numerous instances of fraudulent or illegitimate miracle-workers or magicians. And this about a millennia and a half before scientific instruments and recording came along. Nor is it obvious to me that "prayer does not work as claimed", in contrast to "most people do not understand how prayer is claimed to work".
But more importantly, the point is not that people used to believe in things that did not exist, that they had no good reason beyond appeals to authority and peer pressure to believe existed. The point is that people never stopped believing such things, and continue to believe them to this day.
...But notably does not prevent them from believing any variety of other superstitions, so long as those superstitions are framed as "scientific". There is no functional difference between sacred oil and patent medicine; it's a paint job, that's all.
No it doesn't. That's how they keep getting fooled; science was used to lie to them a hundred times before, but that was all isolated bad actors; this new claim is of course trustworthy, because it's science! Everyone knows that, how silly could you be to doubt it?
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