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In Dante's The Divine Comedy, the virtuous pagans - whose ranks include figures such as Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Ovid, and Virgil - are confined to the first circle of Hell:
Those who inhabit this circle of the Inferno committed no extraordinary sins, over and above the sins that are committed in the course of any human life, that would merit damnation. Many of them were quite exemplary in their conduct and in their virtue. Few men in the middle ages commanded as much respect as Aristotle, whose influence on the development of scholastic philosophy was unrivaled. But they nevertheless had the misfortune of being born before Christ. They were deprived of the one and only way to the Father; thus they cannot be saved. There can be no exceptions. An obligation unfulfilled through no fault of one's own, an obligation that was in fact impossible to fulfill, remains an obligation unfulfilled.
This is a theological issue on which the Church has softened over the centuries. Even relatively conservative Catholics today get squeamish when the issue of Hell is raised. They will say that we "cannot know" who is in Hell and who is not; that this is a matter for God and God alone. It is not our place to pass judgement. But Dante had no such qualms. He was not wracked with inner anxiety, asking himself whether he had the "right" to think such thoughts, as he drew up his precise and detailed classification of all the damned; nor did he live in a culture of religious pluralism that needed to be placated with niceties and assurances. Dante simply knew. This fundamental conviction in what must be, the will to adhere to a vision, to one singular vision, is something that is now quite foreign to us; indeed it is something that is now viewed as rude and suspicious.
This image of the universe as a cosmic lottery with infinite stakes, this idea that one could be consigned to eternal damnation simply for having the bad luck to be born in the wrong century is, of course, psychotic. There is no sense in which it could be considered fair or rational. But all genuine responsibility is psychotic; that is the wager you accept when you choose to be a human instead of a mere appendage of the earth. Kant was well aware of this. Whence the sublime insanity of the categorical imperative, in spite of his utmost and repeated insistence that he was only discharging his duties as the faithful servant of Reason: you can never tell a lie, even to save another's life, even to save your own life. The moment you decide to perform or abandon your duty based on a consideration of the consequences is the moment at which it is no longer a duty for you; the logic of utilitarian calculation has become dominant, rather than the logic of obligation.
I need not persuade you that we suffer from a lack of responsibility today; it is a common enough opinion. We are told that young men are refusing to "grow up": they aren't getting jobs, they aren't getting wives, they aren't becoming stable and productive members of society. Birth rates are cratering because couples feel no obligation to produce children. The right complains that people feel no responsibility to their race, the left complains that people feel no responsibility to the workers' revolution. Despite some assurances that we have entered a post-postmodern era of revitalized sincerity, the idea of being committed to any cause that is not directly related to one's own immediate material benefit remains passé and incomprehensible. The abdication of responsibility, the default of all promises, reaches its apotheosis in the advance of technology, and in particular in the advance of artificial intelligence. The feeling is that one should have no obligations to anyone or anything, one should not be constrained in any way whatsoever, one should become a god unto oneself.
Is there anything we can recover from Dante's notion of cosmic responsibility, which has now become so alien to us? Is there any way that this idea, or even any remnant of it, can again become a living idea, can find root in this foreign soil? Perhaps not necessarily its Christian content, but the form of it, at any rate: the form of a responsibility that is not directed at any of the old and traditional obligations, but may indeed be directed at new and strange things that we can as of yet scarcely imagine.
Plainly we are beyond the domain of "rational" argumentation, or at least any such argumentation that would be accepted in the prevailing Enlightenment-scientific framework. We live in the age of the orthogonality thesis, of the incommensurability of values. In an important sense though we should remember that we are not entirely unique in this condition; the groundlessness of all values is not solely due to the fact that God has fled. There would have been an important open question here for the medieval Christians as well. Such questions date back as far as Plato's Euthyphro: are things Good because they are loved by the gods, or do the gods love Good things because they are Good? Are we truly responsible, in an ontological sense, for following Christ and abstaining from sin, or are we only contingently compelled to do so because of the cosmic gun that God is holding up against all of our heads? It has always been possible to ask this question in any age.
At certain times, the production of new values is a task that has been assigned to artists. Perhaps a poet, if he sings pleasingly enough, could attune people to a new way of feeling and perceiving. But it has never been at all clear to me whether art was really capable of affecting this sort of change or not. I view it as an open question whether any "work" itself (in this I include not only art, but also all the products of philosophical reflection) has ever or could ever affect change at a societal level, or whether all such works are really just the epiphenomena of deeper forces. There is a great deal of research to be done in this area.
There is a certain ontological fracture at the heart of the cultural situation today, a certain paradoxical two-sidedness: from one perspective, centers of power are more emboldened than ever before, able to transmit edicts and commands to millions of people simultaneously and compel their assent; we saw this with Covid. From another perspective, social reality has never been more fragmented, with all traditional centers of social organization (churches, obviously, but also the nightly news, Hollywood, universities) disintegrating in the face of the universal solvent that is the internet, leading to an endless proliferation of individual voices and sub-subcultures. In either case, it is hard to find an opening for authentic change. It is impossible to imagine Luther nailing his theses to the door today, or Lenin storming the Winter Palace. This type of radical fragmentation, when the narrative of no-narrative asserts itself so strongly as the dominant narrative that no escape seems possible, is what Derrida celebrated in Of Grammatology as "the death of the Book, and the beginning of writing" - writing here being the infinite profusion of signs, the infinite freeplay of identities, infinite exchange and infinite velocity, and, in my view - even though Derrida would refuse to characterize it in these terms - infinite stasis.
It's fascinating that Derrida had the foresight in the 1960s, when computing was in its infancy and the internet and LLMs were undreamed of, to say the following about "cybernetics":
(The affinities between the Rationalist ethos and the so-called "irrational postmodern obscurantists" are fascinating, and the subject deserves its own top-level post. @HlynkaCG has been intimating at something real here with his posts on the matter, even though I don't agree with him on all the details. Deleuze would have been delighted at the sight of Bay Area poly orgies - a fitting expression of the larval subject, the desiring machine.)
It's hard to be very optimistic. The best I can offer in the way of advice is to look for small seeds of something good, and cultivate them wherever you find them:
Sorry. My phone ate a more thorough response twice, probably because I kept switching to a memory-hungry tab for the source. So I gave up and posted the short version. Let’s see if I can’t flesh it out.
I think your theory shares a lot with Nietzsche’s. First, that modern culture lacks an ethos present in older societies. Second, that this loss was driven by ideological colonization. Third, that the absence of this ethos cripples Western ability to organize.
Your description of Dante reminded me of this passage. He had his conviction and enacted it, critics be (literally) damned. While I concur with the other comments—Dante was not as authoritative as this portrayal—I see what you were intending. A man who either takes his psychosis seriously or never considers that it is psychotic at all.
Of course, Nietzsche labeled Christianity not as the moral authority, but as the “slave-revolt in morals.” He argued that Judeo-Christian aesthetics had colonized the aristocratic mindset. As Christianity grew, it taught would-be philosophers that ruling was actually cringe—they should renounce their worldly wealth, preach the gospel, et cetera. In other words, they should abandon their duty.
Nietzsche always sketches this subversion as an abuse of Rome’s cosmopolitan tolerance. By analogy, this would be the influence of liberalism and pluralism, methods by which our society demands public consideration of consequences. But Nietzsche perceived it as the hallmark of the Catholic Church.
Clearly, Luther gets some credit. I can’t say whether Nietzsche would have extended a grudging respect to Lenin. Those are the “sample ideologues” I had in mind, rather than Freud and Derrida. Speaking of philosophy-workers, you actually came to opposite conclusions regarding Kant.
Regardless, you and Nietzsche converged on skepticism towards a civilization which labors under slave morality.
He is very clear in condemning his Europe as slavish, utilitarian, masochistic and sometimes effeminate. If postmodernism were around, he’d have hated it too. Surely no culture, no empire can enact its will when hamstrung by a lust for suffering?
And yet.
The 20th century saw dictatorships and aristocracy on a never-before-seen scale. Unimaginable blood and treasure backed up the ambitions of a few men. Regimes warred against Christian thought, not to mention liberalism itself. “Will to power” in action. And what did it buy them? Most went out with a bang. The USSR, a whimper. Outcompeted by the essence of materialist pluralism.
In the end, we may lose out, too. Perhaps even to a certain allegedly socialist, decidedly authoritarian power. But it will not represent the triumphant return of master morality. Even if the wheel turns, Nietzsche missed his chance.
Sure, sure.
It was 'materialist pluralism' that outcompeted them, not a very large, very secure nation which had 40% of world's industrial base and threw its weight decisively against them.
It was pluralism, not the bombs, shells and associated hardware.
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War was certainly one factor Nietzsche thought would contribute to the realisation of the overman (I'll quibble on the point about this being the same as bringing back master morality, he says too many good things about slave morality for the overman to be a mere negation of the slave revolt), but if we're discussing how Nietzsche missed his chance - the wasted opportunity he saw in the Jews as a partial antidote to the nationalistic small-mindedness which was holding the Europeans back from truly becoming clay in the hands of a deserving ruling class should be mentioned. From Beyond Good and Evil 251 (bolding mine):
Yeah, BG&E has a number of interesting takes on Jews. A motivated antisemite could cherrypick any number of quotes to support his position. Same for a motivated philosemite!
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I've already had this problem many times, and even asked Zorba for a fix recently.
In the interim, I get around it by using the clipboard feature in SwiftKey to save the text of my comment as I write it, and that also makes it easier to juggle several links as necessary.
It's a pretty good keyboard, if that helps.
My solution was to finish drafting on a notes app. iPhone master race :P
I've used Google Keep in the past, but just using the clipboard is more convenient since I don't have to leave the website I'm browsing in the interim.
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That's not too surprising - he taught me everything I know! I'm incredibly indebted to him. I'm pretty sure I've read all of his published works (with the exception of WtP).
We do have points of disagreement though - I think he's probably friendlier to transhumanism than I am.
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Beyond Good and Evil, III.46
Consider, though, how many of your sample ideologues persisted after Nietzsche lamented mankind’s loss of a “will to power.”
I’m not quite sure what your intention is here. Would you be willing to elaborate? And who are the “sample ideologues”? Did you mean Freud and Derrida?
I want to make sure I’m clear on what your position is before I start throwing around quotes that may or may not be relevant.
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I think I should remind you that Dante was not, in fact, a theologian. He never claimed that his work was theological in nature and was not received as such. It was meant as entertainment: it's original title was "Comedy" and large chunks of the book are spent on trivial political diatribes where Dante "wins" the argument by portraying himself as the Yes Chad and his political opponents as crying soyjaks tortured by devils.
Just to underline how much his views did not reflect the official views of contemporary Christianity it's worth remembering that one of his other books, De Monarchia, was declared heretical shortly after his death, burned on the stake and 200 years later it was entered in the very first edition of the Index where it stayed until the late 1800s.
He wasn't held in especially high regards in literary circles either, he did have his own small fan club but generally intellectuals considered Boccaccio and Petrarca to be the better (vulgar) italian authors. His contemporary fame is mostly due to being rediscovered, at the end of the 1800s, as part of the founding myth for the italian language.
On the topic of the Church having softened on the topic of hell... probably. However consider that the idea of Purgatory was very prevalent throughout the middle ages and I suspect most people expected to get that, rather than hell, for their minor infractions. If that wasn't the case it would be hard to explain all the money they made off of indulgences.
Furthermore the concept of universal reconciliation (in some form) isn't alien to old christian theology, Origen (~200AD) being the early example. You can find more examples by reading the history of Apokatastasis. I like Eriugena's version, the theological big crunch: you can use it to make a transhumanist version where we all get eternal life through being part of a LLM.
I'd say that the idea of infinite punishments (or rewards) being dished out for finite transgressions is psychotic and possibly betrays the fact that nobody ever truly believed it. As Borges puts it:
There is nothing very remarkable about being immortal; with the exception of mankind, all creatures are immortal, for they know nothing of death. What is divine, terrible, and incomprehensible is to know oneself immortal. I have noticed that in spite of religion, the conviction as to one’s own immortality is extraordinarily rare. Jews, Christians, and Muslims all profess belief in immortality, but the veneration paid to the first century of life is proof that they truly believe only in those hundred years, for they destine all the rest, throughout eternity, to rewarding or punishing what one did when alive
I think you should seriously consider the possibility that people used to do those things because of the immediate material rewards that they entailed and they don't do them anymore (as much) because the calculus has changed. It's likely that "be responsible" is just an easy cudgel to reach and beat people over the head with when they are not doing what you want them to do.
Per wikipedia, it looks like Eriugena wasn't a universalist, despite having some form of apokatastasis?
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Commedia in the 14th century didn't mean light or frivolous. It just meant any story that isn't a tragedy. It would probably be more accurate in today's English to translate Divina Commedia as 'The Divine Story' or 'The Divine Narrative'.
Could you summarize this? I'm very curious.
Sorry wrong person - @aaa?
The bible is vague on a lot of things, so early theologians filled in by borrowing from greek philosophy, mystery cults, etc. The idea that an infinitely good god will eventually save everyone, and therefore that hell is temporary (i.e. apokatastasis), is not that far fetched (certainly less so than a hierarchy of angels, or the trinity) and thus it circulated, pretty much for all of the history of christianity.
Eriugena's version is explained in his book de divisione naturae and it's a very abstract philosophical theory where creation starts in god as ideas (he thinks platonic forms) which eventually become material. Because god has to be the ultimate form of all aristotelian causes he's also the ultimate final cause so everything returns to him through an inverse process.
Thank you! This is a form of Christianity I might actually be able to believe in. Boy the Catholics really ruined a lot of things huh?
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Right, meaning it's a story, it's fictional.
Yes, of course. Dante was a writer, not a theologian or philosopher. I think he did mean Divina Commedia to express truths that he felt were important, both politically and theologically, but he was certainly not writing a scholastic treatise on the way that Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell actually are. He was using his imagination to make a series of other points.
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Going off on a tangent, that translation quoted above is old-fashioned. A more modern one, which I like very much and would highly recommend for the notes and commentary which help explain so many of the references in the poem, is the one produced between 2000-2007 of the entire Divine Comedy by the late Robert and Jean Hollander. Sample for comparision of the same text below:
Actually I'm very fond of the old-style language! I would be interested in the notes and commentary in the newer edition though.
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By the way, this notion of growing up and being a man who knows the stakes and plays his part etc. etc. has become a topic of some contention among the homoerotic sim cluster of the online right (BAPists). I found it interesting in how it clashes with the view prevalent here, espoused e.g. by Hlynka, FC and others. Says BAP:
Also quoting the Samurai.
His follower cites from The Podcast a rant which contains one extremely clear-headed take:
Clarifies another:
I think they're correct in their dunks, to the point no coherent rebuttal can be made (the value of the actually fascistic outlook of BAPists, and its pitfalls, is a topic for another discussion; I, for one, take great issue with their propensity for delusions and dreams of violence, and complete inability and lack of interest in building stuff).
But this familyman ideal is much more authentic and normal than the whole mannerbund LARP – particularly for Europeans with their notion of romantic love and history of pronounced selection by mate preference. It is also more conductive for maintaining order – if at minor scale. And, as with cleaning your room before taking on the world, being a good bourgeois is a deceptively low bar that not everyone can adequately clear.
But that's still a brand of seriousness that's akin to searching for your keys under the lamppost.
But regarding your point.
You might consider that the camel is only the first metamorphosis of the spirit.
I suppose I'd shrug at that and say 'the great man can devote himself whole-heartedly to his work or passion or art or group of alchemists meeting in masks and funny hats because he has a wife at home making sure he has cooked meals, clean clothing, and she handles running the house and making sure the bills are paid'.
There's a balance in everything. Someone who really is happier at home with his family and his pursuits is not a traitor; better that he go home, than stick around distracted and half-assing the job.
I mean, on one level, sure. Some random person who is happy at home isn't a traitor, but that's ignoring the context of a (possibly secret) society devoted to $GREAT_WORK.
Generally when you join such a group, you would take an oath to put the group above all else. It's the betrayal of this oath that constitutes treason, which requires that you be in the in-group before you can commit it. The in-group membership is important. The same way someone born in Bolivia cannot be a traitor to the country of Iraq, someone who never joined the secret society can't be a traitor. An enemy? Sure. But not a traitor.
Presumably the takeaway is that someone who is happier at home should never take such an oath and join such a society, which seems reasonable. But the context of the quote seems to specify someone who has already made such a commitment.
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Yes, I was almost hesitant to include this example in the OP, because I knew it would be misunderstood. I considered elaborating on this point further, but the post was already at the character limit anyway.
I don't think that men should slavishly adhere to this particular life track - get a wife, get a house, get an office job and climb the corporate ladder - merely because it is the currently fashionable view of what it means to "be a man". I don't want people to live lives of meaningless hedonism, but I don't want them to be rubes either. You first have to ask yourself if the woman is worth loving, if the society is worth serving (in this particular way).
If someone says they have no time to build a family because they have to go be a great artist or whatever, then that's fine by me. He'll probably fail of course, but this is no great catastrophe to himself or anyone else; the social organism can easily tolerate a small number of losses of this type.
For the great majority of men who don't have anything else going on, building a family is probably the most meaningful way they can spend their time.
There's a fuckton of selfishness hiding under that bushel, though; for every one guy who does become a star (or even manages to become a professional who can earn a living from their art), there's twenty who are just indulging themselves and will continue to be 'in a band' or whatever for years and never get anywhere.
I'm probably prejudiced, though, by the case I encountered in social housing of the guy who left his small kids to his elderly mother to take care of, because he had to go 'be an artist' (he was a musician). Of course he never made it as a career, but it was sure handy for him to be able to dump his responsibilities on his family and go off to live the way he wanted.
Well, there certainly might be. Or there might not be. It always depends on the specifics of the situation in question. It's certainly possible to use ostensibly noble goals as an excuse for laziness, hedonism, and all the rest; but sometimes a noble commitment really is just a noble commitment with no ulterior motives.
I agree with you that there's very unlikely to be anything praiseworthy about a man abandoning his children. He should have thought about the consequences before he had children, and he should have to live with those consequences even if he feels them to be a burden.
Yeah, my view is "You're single and don't have any committments? Go do what you like". But once you have dependents or committments, then man (or woman, this applies to the ladies too) up and do your duty.
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The problem that religions face regarding hell is that the adherent can pick whether or not to believe in it, and whether or not to go to church or believe in anything at all. Hell as a concept is ultimate punishment in the psychological sense; it is ultimate deterrence, so the point is to modify our present behavior. As a method of ultimate deterrence it can’t be triumphed over by good deeds. Why? For too many reasons to list really, but the big ones are: doing good deeds for their own sake puts the focus on an action, whereas morality comes from focusing on the Good which is God, and there would be no need to focus on the Good if a simple ToDo list saves all eternal ills; not every person can immediately do good deeds, even if they are essentially on a perfect moral path given their past behavior, which could lead to people like alcoholics and the infirm to feel that they are damned until they are cured; it reduces a person‘s interest in all religion, if all Good can be received from a simple checklist, and Christianity is a religion designed to socialize morality communally within the fully human Christ.
If hell is perfect deterrence, a huge problem arises in how to condition a person into this deterrence who is not seriously religious. A serious Christian sees the options as heaven or hell, but someone less religious sees it as “non-hell and probably heaven” vs hell. In other words, they are deterred from buying into the deterrence. Why have a fear of hell, when I’ll have less fear if I don’t believe it at all? So in order to even buy into the punishment of hell, you need to first buy into religion generally; in the same way that first you need the boy to sign up for the Great War, and only later can you force him to walk through no man’s land at the battle of the Somme.
This is very ironic, but hell is only for the believers. It is for the believers in the sense that the believers reap the full harvest of fearing hell. But in order for the magic of hell to work, you need to be always and perpetually saved from it by knowing the next moral action or step. And, in an ideal variant of Christianity, this is Christ — the socialized Good — and every step in your moral life would be his very steps on his path.
I am a big fan of hell, as an idea. It should be conceived of as not an additional thing to fear, but instead the One True Fear. So the kids today who are afraid that their zoomer haircut isn’t perm’d well enough, or that the Taylor Swift tickets are sold out — all of their petty fears would be sublimated to one great fear, the fear of evilness (which in Christian thought is eradicated from believing and imitating Christ).
People don' choose what they believe in. They choose what they profess to believe in.
Trying to solve everything by putting a policeman into everyone's head is not efficient.
That's where secular power comes in. If repeated beatings don't work because the transgressor is a psychopath (sensitive to reward only, not punishment), then execution or exile solves the problem.
...This meme is absolutely maddening. Are you asserting that profession of belief has no identifiable connection to actual belief? Do you at least agree that beliefs actually exist? If they exist, how do they come to exist, given that we can observe their absence at one point in time and their presence at another?
I read him as saying that beliefs are involuntary.
Yes. Why would one believe such a thing? Is there a FAQ or a Sequence this meme derives from?
Can you believe right now that your computer is on fire? (if so, could you take a second and do so?)
I find that I cannot bring myself to believe my computer is on fire. Likewise, I find that I cannot bring myself to believe that Communism is a beneficent and efficient political system. Granted, I did not try very hard; a handful of seconds each.
Examining these two failures, I find that while instantiating each of these beliefs is too hard to manage with minimal effort, they are hard for entirely different reasons. When I try to believe that my laptop is on fire, my brain checks against sense data of my eyes and hands, which immediately contradict the idea. When I think of Communism, my brain goes to memory, cached thoughts and arguments. It seems to me that the two types of belief are engaging with completely different mental processes; concrete vs abstract, say.
Suppose I concede that concrete processes really can enforce belief. Why should this make me believe that abstract processes can be similarly forced?
It's not just sense data. For an example, suppose I asked you to believe that your computer (or phone or whatever you're using) would catch on fire in 1 minute. You have no sense data to contradict that (at least, for the next minute). But I assume you can't just make yourself believe that your computer's about to catch on fire without being given any sort of evidence in favor of it.
This wouldn't seem to be using the concrete mechanism you described, I would think?
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Things I'm reasonably certain on:
forcing people to profess a belief may make some of them later come to genuinely adopt it
social pressure certainly makes people adopt beliefs of others as their own.
psychologically normal people (I assume) cannot choose what they 'believe in' consciously.
There's probably a bit of confusion here because due to interactions with my native language (slavic), I mostly use 'belief' in the sense of 'religious faith / axioms the individual assumes' etc.
So, to restate, I don't think it's common for a person to consciously decide to e.g. 'believe in God' or 'believe that pitbulls are as harmless as other dogs'.
No, I'm just grumpy today, sorry. I'm arguing this same thing in a separate thread.
Suppose a missionary travels to some small country in east Asia, preaches to the locals, and some of them decide to convert to Christianity. They are clearly professing to believe in God, but suppose they also make significant changes to their way of life to conform to what they've been taught are Christian principles, and continue this new pattern of behavior indefinitely. Can it be said that these people have in fact consciously decided to believe in God? If not, what is happening here?
Ditto for belief that "trans women are women", or "love is love", or whatever other charged slogan you've observed abruptly exploding in popularity.
Maybe a few of them decided to try to believe in the new religion and then genuinely managed to do so.
But I'd say the rest of them may have had their worldview changed by the preaching, which collapsed their previous belief structure. They were psyopped, in other words.
Most people don't really have very sophisticated belief systems.
I remember laughing out loud when a Jehovah's Witness who was trying to convert me brought up a pod of beans as an example of intelligent design.
Would have worked on some people, for sure. etc.
Weak or undecided agreeable people subconsciously align themselves with what they perceive to be the most popular message.
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Hell is not purely deterrence, if you believe in some form of penal substitutionary atonement. If any part of Christ's death was to take on the penalty for sin, then it is not at all clear why that would be necessary or good, under a deterrence model—punishing Jesus doesn't really deter anyone, and it is mostly unclear what doing it in someone else's stead would accomplish, instead of just dropping the punishment.
Should people be trying to get away from fear, or from hell?
The proper model of hell is of it not being primarily about deterrence, but about retribution, not about setting up incentives, but that punishment for evil is a thing valuable in itself. I'm sure there are better quotes out there, but it was the martyrs in Revelation that came to mind: "They cried out with a loud voice, 'O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood upon those who dwell on the earth?'"
What I mean by deterrence is that the excellent philosophers of antiquity (probably including Philo) crafted Christianity in an attempt at an optimal way of life, which included the essential concepts of reinforcement and punishment baked in — or, incentive and deterrence. As in, the concept of hell has a utility. This is why the living philosophy of Christianity matches so well an optimal prosocial reinforcement model of behavior; because that was the point.
What would be the purpose of Christ in a narrative seeking to be the best possible reinforcement / punishment model of behavior? There’s a lot accomplished here. For one, if Jesus saves us from hell then it increases love for Jesus optimally. Second, if imitating Jesus is the way to heaven, then the person imitates an optimally prosocial and wise way of life. Third, a community gathered together to mourn our Perfect Martyr is a community which has perfect guidelines, a perfect exemplar, a perfect story, and a perfect friend and mentor in spirit, or in persona et spiritus Christi. Fourth, we see the damage of sin on display when humans killed God. Fifth, we see the holiness of God on display that he bore man’s sin while forgiving him. Sixth, we see the eternity of God in that he is resurrected.
Importantly, at least IMO, a Christian must fear Hell. This is literally commanded of us:
But that isn't really the case, at least, universally across Christianity. Protestant strains of Christianity separate works from reward in a way that removes much of the incentives. Protestants do of course believe that you should do good things, and they do believe that those who are changed will be sanctified, not remaining in the mire of sin to the same extent, but salvation in the end is not based upon the quality of the subsequent works. This lessens the incentives, and ends up with good works being done more out of duty or gratitude or, well, just thinking that it's a good thing to do.
I guess I also don't really see why you identify as a Christian (which I assume you do by the final us), if you seem to think of it as a merely human sociological phenomenon. Do you think it's beneficial, but not true? A noble lie?
This view of Christ is sorely lacking. You seem to view Christianity as an attempt to make people good. And so, it seems that Christ is useful, but not essential.
I see Christianity as the manifestation of the divine work of reconciling God and man. Christ cannot be dispensed with in this, he is at the center of everything. The second Adam, our substitute, the mediator between God and man, our intercessor, the firstborn from the dead. In Ephesians, this is shown powerfully, as over and over again we are told that every blessing that we have, from predestination to adoption to redemption to our inheritance is all "in Christ." Our being made better is merely one (important) aspect of that work.
Protestantism is a strange case, because iirc the original Protestants (Luther et al) believed that works followed nearly intrinsically from proper faith. Today, I don’t think this is really the case among Evangelicals. I find this impossible to square with the contents of the Gospel, for instance that those who say “Lord, Lord” but do not help poor brothers are damned and in fact never knew him. This is one of the last things Christ said before the Passion and it is clearly explicated in the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. I think what happened is a kind of superstition where “believe in Christ” turned into “believe I don’t have to do anything because Christ will do it”, whereas the original believe/faith meant in assenting to the whole of Jesus as a living message from God. As Jesus clearly says for us to do things, “believe in Jesus” would very much mean that we have to do things. But it’s more expansive than that, and also means that we have to imitate him.
If I could be most charitable to early Protestantism, I would say they were trying to prioritize motivation from love with no fear of hell and no care for conscious imitation. The atonement works through pure spectating, with none of the “carry our cross daily”. Instead of imitating Jesus, the focus is purely on how Jesus healed your sins. This should turn into maximal thanks and gratitude; the gratitude then naturally leads you to follow Jesus because he suggests you do, but you do it with zero faith. I think such a theology could work if a person has a perfect love for Jesus. But that perfect love is hard to come by. I think contrite repentance, continual thanks, and some fear is much more likely to develop a perfect love over time than a “once and for all” Herculean spectator crucifixion.
I definitely think Christianity is beneficial, provided it is explored in the right way. I consider it something like… “clothed philosophy”. The Logos becomes Man, to ease the yoke and lighten our burdens. Because I think if a person is able to see how maximally joyful human life could be, they would consider their current lives to be approximately hell. Religion is about the perfection of human life, so it turns philosophy into story and ritual. So I see everything in Christianity as intended to make us better, not just morally but in emotion (spirit) as well. I think without this in mind, religion is apt to become superstitious and then wasteful and ultimately deadening.
I don't see how that example is at all difficult to be squared with the beliefs of the early protestants (If I'm parsing that correctly). (Feel free to model me as an early protestant.)
Right, believing in Jesus is not separable from doing things, though it would not itself be the doing of those things.
Are we reading the same early Protestants?* Here's Calvin:
and
So there certainly is a carrying of your cross. But if your point is that that is not the means by which the atonement applies, that is correct.
What do you mean by "you do it with zero faith"?
Am I correct in reading this that you don't think that Christianity is true, merely beneficial?
*a rhetorical question
Going to use bullet points just for ease of replying to individual things
If Protestants hold that “believing in the crucifixion is sufficient to save us from the punishment of sin and guarantee the new life”, then they can’t also hold “Christ says you must perform certain actions to be resurrected into the new life”. Christ specifically says that those who believe in him but do not perform certain actions will be thrown into hell, because Christ is found in the poor-off brother, and so whatever you do to him you do to Christ. These two conceptions of the Judgment are mutually exclusive. If anyone holds that “believing alone” guarantees salvation at the judgment, or that the crucifixion alone as something one agrees happened, they have to deny what Christ said on numerous actions: that certain actions are required to be saved from hell. Now, if instead you take “faith” to mean “assenting to every word Jesus says”, then this expansive-defined faith is sufficient. Because under the umbrella “faith” you find “must do certain actions to be freed from hell”. These actions are in Christ in the sense of spirit, they spring up from the Christ in a person versus a person’s identity. Yet, they must be performed using your mind and body and heart.
Re “it would not itself be the doing of those things”, Christ specifically says that it is the doing of those things. If Christ wanted to say that simply professing he is God saved, then he would say that. But he says certain things just be done, else hell.
The Protestants you posted do not believe that imitating Christ is what grants heaven and the new life. Instead they suggest you do it. This is actually what I wrote by the way. The problem is that there is hardly a motivation, because simply believing that Jesus died for sins is sufficient to save someone from damnation.
Re: truth of Christianity, no. Truth does not necessarily mean historicity or literalism. Literalism is not the way many early Christians interpreted scripture. A thing can be true because it represents greater truth.
Re: what faith is, the historical protestant definition involved both knowledge and trust, not knowledge purely.
And he does express, several times, that faith is sufficient.
Protestants usually understand the passages about what sorts of people enter eternal life either to be true because those who are justified by faith are also sanctified by the work of the Holy Spirit, or to be talking about what the law requires, which Christ has satisfied.
Ah, but look at what Paul says:
So Paul, at least, thinks that the actual literal claims are important, in at least one particular.
Jesus also consistently takes scripture seriously.
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Anyone who conceives of Hell as a concept, as opposed to an actual thing, is already atheist right?
So to be clear, the people being deterred can't know they're being deterred, right?
People have believed in hell, or similar, without a concomitant heaven. The classic example is the view of the afterlife for the Greeks and Romans, as shown in the Odyssey where the shades of the dead are mindless twittering things until they lap up the blood of the sacrifice and where Achilles says 'better a live dog than a dead lion', more or less:
Hence why the Elusinian and other mystery cults which held out promises of a better life after death were popular.
Other cultures have similar concepts, or concepts of the dead as malevolent, jealous of the living and so eager to work them harm. The idea that ordinary people could go on to a pleasant afterlife may not be unique to Christianity, but I think it had to be a big selling point.
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This depends on what you mean by “actual thing”. Philo of Alexandria was an influential Jewish Platonist who interpreted the Old Testament allegorically and had a large influence on early Christianity. Does this mean he didn’t think the stories were “actual things”? He believed that they conveyed actual, spiritual truths by way of allegory and symbolism. Same with Origen, another influential early Christian. When we talk about the reality of religion we also have to understand that perfect certainty in God is rare; hence the leap of faith, the “I believe, help my unbelief” in the Gospel. Believing with all your mind and heart that God is real, and tries you and judges you, and hell is an ever-present danger, is hard even for the most fervent literalist.
Religions must persuade people, and they are competing against lifestyles that abound in much more primitive pleasures. A person can believe in hell and know that hell is a deterrence IMO, but there’s a moral or philosophical development that must take place, or else they might opt out of the entire religion.
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My belief is the exact opposite of this. The whole reason hell's nature and existence is not obvious to everyone is so that it doesn't modify our present behavior.
I also find your focus on good deeds interesting. Good deeds accomplish nothing in the end, yes, but moral growth is what God wants, and moral growth leads to good deeds. I agree that hell is a deterrent, but that's not it's ultimate purpose. It is a fundamental necessity to satisfy the law of justice. We only know about it because knowledge of justice also aids in our moral growth and helps us to "grow up" spiritually. Also, we know that evil will always be punished, whether in this life or in the next. This helps us to rest assured that justice will be served, and focus on our own moral growth rather than chasing revenge or growing to resent God due to the success we see in wicked people.
I think it's more that believers are less harmed by fearing hell than nonbelievers, while the benefits of fearing hell are constant regardless of your level of belief. Doing good because you fear hell is the same as doing good for the reward. It's pretty much worthless and is not what God wants.
I really don't want to come across as unnecessarily combative (what would the point even be? Empirically, religious debate is people yelling at each other and not convincing anyone of anything), but holy shit, the sheer amount of mental gymnastics espousing this requires..
I can't reconcile a omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent deity intentionally creating a hell in the first place, let alone building entities it knows with 100% certainty will end up there. (And if it doesn't know with 100% certainty, it's not omniscient is it?)
That, to put it bluntly, is an asshole move.
I don't expect you (or anyone else) to have a good answer, because that problem is fundamentally irreconcilable, at least until you zoom out and realize you're arguing about the properties of a nonexistent entity.
I think Christians have plot-holed themselves into a corner, if they hadn't shot for the moon and claimed a truly all-powerful creator, then they could at least claim that evil exists because of an inability to completely stamp it out, while also endorsing that believing and practising was still a net positive in expectation.
When people complain about utilitarians having to grapple with repugnant conclusions, none of the conclusions are as offensive as this is to any reasonable sensibilities.
It's akin to some bored kid setting up a terrarium, not feeding anything it, and then crucifying the starving survivors for the crime of cannibalism. It's all on you dog backwards.
Well, under a Christian view of how serious sin is, having sin with hell is better than the same sin without hell, since at least in the sin with hell, the sin is punished. The actual difficulty is why God would create beings that sin in the first place.
One possible answer is that the redemption of some that did happen—Jesus dying and rising from the dead and converting sinners and God's converting sinners, from the patriarchs to Israel down to the Christians of today—made the whole worth it, that this is in some way better than just having men that never fell.
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Well you could start by figuring out my actual beliefs instead of telling me that the beliefs you've imagined I have are wrong. I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, commonly known as a Mormon, so keep in mind my beliefs aren't shared by the majority of Christianity.
God is omnipotent compared to us but not literally omnipotent. He has to follow the rules. He can't change what 'good' is, and probably cannot create or destroy matter either. Most importantly, he cannot give us agency without allowing some of us to be evil. If we do not have agency then none of us can truly choose to be good, so having agency is more important than guaranteeing that we're all good.
I think it's consistent to view God as all-powerful, but incapable of changing the fundamental rules of logic. Having been through quite a bit of physical pain in my life I remain unconvinced that natural evil exists or is very important anyways. I think if we were all hooked up to 5 gallons / s IVs of heroin, we would experience a temporary rate slowdown to 4 gallons / s as pain. We need some natural opposition in order to be able to recognize the good for what it is.
If God were Logically Omnipotent and could change the rules of logic, then yes, that would imply that he has chosen for 'evil' to exist. Still, I'm not sure that means he's not omnibenevolent. To remove evil would require changing the rules in ways we humans cannot possibly understand in our current forms. Would you choose to delete suffering altogether? Doing so would perhaps lead to vast consequences related to our ability to perceive joy at all. Magically recreate our ability to perceive joy, even though we've never experienced anything else, and I would wonder whether perhaps then a more fundamental rule of logic would be violated, and so on.
To be clear, I suspect we are already metaphorically in the 5 gallon / s IV scenario. Like I said I have experienced extreme pain, and even in the moments that it was worst, existence felt much happier and more pleasurable than nonexistence.
This is pretty esoteric at this point but I really do think there are satisfactory answers to the problem of theodicy.
My apologies for assuming, but the majority of the Christians I've argued here with on-and-off for years were from more standard denomination.
That being said, I have no idea how anyone remains a Mormon when the overwhelming evidence of fraud in its very foundation exist. At least Catholics and Protestants make claims that were so far in the past they can't be trivially debunked.
Sure, I can grant that it's still meaningful omnipotence even if God can't ignore the laws of logic.
That being said, I don't see how you can hold that a decrease in pleasure is pain, while not recognizing that it's possible to have diminished agency while still having agency.
Maybe everyone could be good, but varying degrees of good, and trying to be better can be one's life's goal.
It doesn't forgive the outright infinite amount of suffering consigning even a single person to hell does. That's the work of an asshole, or at least someone who doesn't claim to be benevolent. There are certainly people I'd consign to Hell myself, but I never claimed perfect benevolence as fact about myself.
Sorry, but this is utter nonsense. This does not gel at all with a biological understanding of pain as a whole, since pain is a qualitatively different qualia, and not merely the absence of the sensation of pleasure.
The very existence of gradients of pleasure is sufficient to allow one to infer the opposite direction, and posit something that is outright negative pleasure, not merely no pleasure or a lesser yet positive level of it.
For an obvious proof, humans had never encountered negative numbers in their ancestral environment, and there is no single physical entity in the world that itself can be negative. It's only by interaction between entities that we can usefully build intuition of negatives. You can have 1 or 2 apples, not -1 apples, but you can use that concept to simplify the mathematics of things such as being indebted to provide someone an apple on demand. But at no point do you actually have less than zero apples.
Since humans have shown a distressing ability to invent untrue and useless concepts like souls on a regular basis, I think that even in some utopian environment where nobody ever felt outright pain, someone will inevitably invent the concept of "pain", if only as a plot point in their equivalent to a horror scifi novel.
Easy, I have overwhelming personal evidence of the truth of the church. Besides, I bet the vast majority of the "overwhelming evidence" you have in mind boils down to "well obviously that can't happen because God isn't real." There is some weird stuff in the church's past for sure but not nearly enough to outweigh my own experiences confirming the truth of the church's claims.
I'm going to assume you don't have "warp the rules of logic" in mind here, because IMO it's pretty futile to talk about the effects of that sort of change, except to say that they would be vast and we cannot possibly understand what would happen (since our understanding relies on logic). So the only two possibilities I can think of here are that either all choices are basically the same, or some choices are substantially better than others but all choices are good. The former I think removes agency entirely. Humans entirely lose the ability to make any difference at all. The latter definitely allows for evil IMO. If you are consistently choosing to bake cakes for your friends rather than saving orphans' lives, I think you are an evil person even though both choices are "good".
Separately, like I was saying, goodness is only valuable to the degree which it is a choice. Agency is valuable in its own right. So it's not clear to me why God would limit our agency (and thus our ability to be good) rather than allowing for both good and evil.
Can be and must be are two very different things. If people are forced to make being better their life's goal, they have no agency at all. If they are not forced to, and they choose not to, then they are evil.
Sure. I don't believe hell is literally infinite anyways.
You've cherry-picked certain parts of biology in order to claim that the objective truth is on your side. I agree that pain is not simply an absence of pleasure, but my claim was not that it always was. What I said was that we would experience an absence of pleasure as pain. When I say "pain" I obviously don't mean "solely physical pain".
That said, brains have a remarkable ability to adapt to new baselines and ignore predictable stimuli. I am currently in a fairly large amount of pain--probably the equivalent of stubbing a few toes, if I had to guess, though my estimation is untrustworthy for reasons which will soon become clear. I do not notice this pain unless I think about it. It has remained at that constant state for years and now essentially feels like nothing to me.
On the flip side, pleasure seems to work the same way--we quickly gain tolerance to the strongest drugs. I think if someone were to remain on heroin or something for a long period of time (rather than experiencing the "down" when they come off their high) they would quickly stop noticing the high at all. Of course there would be plenty of neurological side effects, but basically what I'm saying is that if there was a magic button we could press to give ourselves a high, with no side effects at all (an impossibility I know), someone who kept it pressed all the time would be indistinguishable, both to themselves and to others, from someone who never pressed it. I think it would be fair to characterize the experience of someone addicted to hard drugs, but not currently on a high, as "pain".
Besides that, pain is simply not important. Getting broken up with hurt way more than crapping out liters of blood. The very worst pains which we as humans can experience have to do not with experiencing suffering, but with experiencing a loss of pleasure. Losing parents or a girlfriend or w/e only matters because those people were valuable sources of joy in the first place. I have not experienced any suffering due to my lack of a third parent, but I will suffer quite a bit if one of my parents dies, therefore deriving me of the joy which they would provide to me.
Negative numbers still don't exist though. They only exist to the extent that they affect positive numbers. You can't have -1 sheep. At best you can have to work much longer to buy your first sheep, since you first need to pay off your debt before you get one. The minimum amount of sheep a person can own is 0.
Similarly, yes, I agree that negative pleasure exists, but it does so only inasmuch as it subtracts from existing pleasure. You could basically call it the absence of pleasure. I believe pain to be in this category. It does subtract pleasure, so it can certainly be called negative pleasure, but I don't believe it can subtract pleasure to below 0. I don't think any human can ever experience such agony that their existence is actually more painful than not.
Sure, but even putting myself in the mindset of someone who had a propensity/desire to believe in some supernatural entity, the sheer degree of willful ignorance needed to become a Mormon would almost certainly make me opt for a denomination that had the kind fig leaf of being founded centuries or millenia ago, where these kinds of irregularities can be found.
Sadly, I don't expect to convince you of this, because of the robust memetic immune system your upbring has inculcated in you. (I'm assuming you were raised Mormon, feel free to correct me)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Smith
https://www.mrm.org/sharing-with-mormons-joseph-smith-lie
Once I again, I reiterate that I'm helpless to convince you, and I submit this primarily to convince impartial observers that I'm not talking out of my ass.
Sure, doesn't mean they're not useful. Similarly, even our conceptions of "1 apple" aren't atomic, since the intentional separation of the apple from the environment from its environment is at least partially arbitrary. An apple is not an ontologically fundamental entity, to find truly discrete entities, one must dive down to the depths of Quantum Mechanics, such as "Planck time".
Sure, it can't literally delete the signal of pleasure, but it can produce states that are practically indistinguishable from only pure pain.
Someone getting their dick sucked while their teeth are being pulled out with pliers is getting some pleasure out of it, since the nerves in the penis don't give a shit what's happening to your teeth. But I think it's obvious that the situation is tantamount to someone experiencing a slightly less bad form of torture, or at least the person would be indifferent between the two.
I chose somatic pain because it's by far the best studied, and the one I'm most familiar with it. But unless you disagree that even more emotional kinds of pain don't bottom out in the firing patterns of neurons, the analogy stands tall.
Also, I'm happy for you if you're lucky enough not to have experienced bodily pain so fucking bad merely losing all of one's pleasure in life is getting off lightly.
Someone breaking up is certainly not as unhappy or in pain as another having their skin flayed off.
I can't say that even my worst breakup was anywhere near as bad as a bout of appendicitis in my childhood that had me curled up into a ball.
The implication that the memetic immune system associated with my religion is responsible for my beliefs is flatly incorrect. By far the strongest "immune response" it supposedly taught me was to trust in the results of prayer above all else. This is not something which I believed, and honestly still not something which I can bring myself to believe most of the time, due to its obvious epistemic danger. Far more likely is that I'm simply biased to believe in what my parents taught me. Honestly I think I overcorrected for that though, and spent much longer reading philosophy textbooks, atheist arguments, etc. than I should have, fearing that my belief was purely a result of my upbringing rather than due to any connection to the truth.
Memetic immune systems are simply not that powerful, full stop. There is nobody alive, and no possible memetic immune system, which renders anyone with their mental faculties completely immune to the truth. At best you can claim that it takes longer to convince someone of the truth than it should.
I hope you have enough respect for me to realize that I have already heard and looked into these sorts of concerns far more than you have. Besides, it's not like it takes much research at all to hear of this sort of thing. The church itself published the results you mention (that the recovered papyri were part of the Book of Breathing) in church magazines very soon after the original report was released.
If you look into it more, the papyri which the Book of Abraham came from were actually pretty clearly not the ones which were recovered. The eyewitness accounts alone establish this, while simple deductive reasoning sufficiently confirms it. IIRC Smith had about 100 feet of papyrus, most of which he himself claimed to be unrelated to the Book of Abraham, and of which only about 2.5 feet has been recovered.
As far as the Alphabet and Grammar, the theory about it which I prefer is that it was an attempt to reverse-engineer the language post-translation. It seems pretty clear from contemporary accounts that the language was not actually used in the "translation". I put "translation" in quotes because at other times Smith simply wrote "translations" of things, such as rewriting certain chapters of the Bible, from whole cloth. In most cases (as with the Book of Mormon) the source material does not actually seem to have been used for most of the process. This of course sounds pretty absurd. All I can say is that it is obviously possible with God involved and I have seen sufficient evidence in my own life to convince me that these things must be true, whatever the actual explanation turns out to be.
I think I was pretty clear in my position that negative numbers are useful. Your point about ontologically fundamental entities seems pretty irrelevant to me. There's no such thing as a negative Planck length either.
I feel like I've been pretty clear here and you're trying to sidestep me. I absolutely believe in biology, but your focus on your own limited understanding of neurons is muddying the water. You totally ignored everything I was saying about the pain that I experience, as well as the obvious tendency people have to grow tolerant to all forms of pain and pleasure. If your position is that pain is pain is pain, you are flat out wrong. The brain mediates all experiences quite heavily before our conscious minds perceive them, and can easily turn pain into pleasure or pleasure into pain. Heck, spicy food literally activates a pain receptor in the tongue and we experience that as a somewhat pleasurable experience.
Yes. Me too. My assertion is that such pain does not exist.
I disagree, as someone who has experienced more pain than that. I would rather have my skin flayed off a thousand times than go through what I went through again (at least as far as physical pain goes). I would rather go through what I went through a thousand times than go through that breakup again.
Sure, and states indistinguishable from pure pain are what I would call 0. You are losing a vast amount of joy by being incapable of thought, appreciating the world around you, etc. and that's it. The pain itself is entirely irrelevant.
What I experienced was severe ulcerative colitis which lasted about 8 months. Appendicitis has basically the exact same symptoms as ulcerative colitis, to the point that people with ulcerative colitis often mistake appendicitis as another flare-up of their own symptoms. I don't know which is more painful in the moment, but given appendicitis is much shorter-term I would choose to experience that every time.
Would you honestly choose to break up with your partner rather than experience appendicitis again? If so, I simply think you're wrong and would be happier suffering through the appendicitis again. If not, you understand my point, which is that the vast majority of suffering stems from a loss of joy. The correct way to think about pain is to give it basically no importance, except inasmuch as it interferes with actually important things like your ability to hold down a job and experience life.
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Seems to me that the big problem with hell is that in the modern world we don’t know what the next right step is. Things are so complex and even Christianity is so divided it’s hard to know who is right.
I’m, uh, pretty sure that the problem is all the suffering. The infinity of suffering. Squaring that circle with a loving God has led to far more contortions than mere earthly disagreements.
Yeah, no, that's a big problem too. It's sad, I genuinely want to believe in Christianity and/or God, but good lord is it difficult to square the mythos with the modern world in any logical or rational manner.
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Under a Christian understanding of hell, that suffering is earned, and so carrying it out is just. The real difficulty is why God would create humans who would do so grievous a thing as sin. There's the "free-will" response, but I'm convinced that Calvinism is correct. I'll just go with Romans 9:
That is, a hearty dose of "who am I to judge God" (see Job), while recognizing that that is indeed within God's righteous judgment—here giving the possibility that at least some is intended to highlight the his mercy, where it does exist. And, of course, Genesis 50:20's "you meant it for evil, but God meant it for good" (referring to Joseph's brothers selling him) is relevant.
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Christianity solves this problem in a neat way. Imagine that you have with you a perfect friend and mentor who wants to shape you into a morally great person, and who uses the moral principle of “do unto others what you would have them of unto you”, and who has a collection of teachings he sent you. Now imagine he died to rescue you from eternal punishment. Then imagine the power of his moral teaching (the substance in a sense) resurrected himself, and that he will come back to judge you according to your soul — and those who are evil he will cast into hell.
Whatever action results from the belief is the next step, which is wholly contingent on a person’s background, personality, place in the moral process, etc (as it should be). By this I mean that a repentant pathological liar who cuts his lies by 5% every day is going to please God, versus a usually truthful person who has begun to lie 1% more every day without guilt. And it’s like this with all sins obviously. This is one of the points of the parable of the tax collector (an immoral profession) and the Pharisee, and the lesson of the widow’s mite. This is why the topic of moral discussion is not the consequent effects (actions) but the antecedent source (“out of the heart…”).
Then you might say something like, “oh, well then I will save my repentance for much later in my life”, but of course if you imagine an intelligent future judge this will not fly. What will be magically different about your procrastinating soul that is not in it today, when you are younger? It will be even harder to repent if your soul grows hardened, and of course there are many parables about this too. How would you personally judge someone who puts off the most important tasks out of cleverness? That is how God will judge. And in any case, the hour is near (the early Christians lived as if Christ was already “at the door ready to knock”; whether they truly believed that the world will end is far less significant than that they lived accordingly).
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I think without the firm conviction of a Truth or Right Way to Live such a thing is impossible. Dante could damn people to hell because he lived in a time and place where everyone agreed that hell existed and that God had certain conditions to be met if one wants to avoid going there (and everyone agreed on what they were of course, as this was Roman Catholic Europe). We’ve lost that because we no longer have a bedrock of Certain and Known Truths that must be reckoned with.
And going to the point you bring up with the church, the thing that softened her most was plurality. Protestants at first, then monotheistic religious people and so on. She doesn’t want to drive wedges between people and herself and so she softens her position on as much as she can without anyone noticing. In the early days of Trent, they ordered the faithful not to accept a Bible from a Protestant. In fact, the idea was to take it an throw it in the fire with obvious contempt. Obviously they no longer do that, and in fact consider that Islam and Judaism are now okay even if imperfect (from their point of view). Why? Because now the church is trying to not seem like meanies to other religious groups who look at Rome.
Of course the problem is that once a social institution loses the idea of absolute truth and one right way, it essentially becomes a social club. They still wear the robes and chant in Latin on occasion, but without the ability to give a firm Yes or No, without a Thus Saith The Lord, there’s no power behind it. University is going the same way as it abandoned the idea of a dispassionate search for Truth and teaching of Truth it’s just glorified indoctrination with a side of hopefully useful job skills. It’s lost authority because it no longer believes in Truth, searches for Truth, or teaches even the Truth it does know.
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Really? I thought it was canon that Christ descended to the pre-Crucifixion afterlife and preached to the souls imprisoned there to gather to Himself those who accept Him, and bring them to Paradise.
It is. 1 Peter 4:6:
(barring a few nitpicks about the way you phrased it - 'bringing people to Paradise' is a slightly misleading way of talking about the Resurrection, but no matter)
You can extrapolate whatever you like from this, but I tend to think the implication is that everybody, whether living or dead, whether they heard the gospel preached in their lifetime or not, will have a genuine opportunity to know the gospel and choose to follow God.
That said this has not been universal Christian consensus and you can easily find missionaries panicking over the billions of people who never had a chance to accept Christ - but personally I think the case for it is pretty strong.
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He is only following Saint Augustine there; it has long been debated when or in what circumstances lyng is justified, if it is ever justified.
Yes, but Kant put a very unique spin on it: his claim was that the prohibition against lying (among many other prohibitions) followed directly from the structure of rational agency itself; it was not grounded in any external source such as divine law or a natural telos. Anyone who is committed to their own rational autonomy must necessarily come to the same conclusion. The empty form of logic generates its own content without the need for any additional premises. The idea that a mere "commitment to reason" could lead to such apparently absurd conclusions is, I think, part of the lasting fascination with his ethics.
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I owe no truth to those who value it not. If a Nazi came to my door asking if I am hiding Jews, he’s asking if I’m hiding a member of an internationalist cabal dedicated to degrading all morality and becoming masters of a communist world plantation. I can easily say no, because I am not, no matter how many Cohens and Goldbergs are in my attic or crawlspace.
Ooh, that's a new type of 'mental reservation', one that I haven't encountered yet.
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Is that your real objection? If it was instead a serial killer who you believe doesn't have any particularly inaccurate beliefs about his victims, but simply enjoys killing people and has been hunting the person you're hiding as his next target, would you tell him the truth or would you come up with a different excuse for why it's acceptable to lie?
It seems like probably the real reason you don't tell the truth is simply that if you do it'll result in someone's death and no real gain, just adherence to the "don't lie" rule. But if that's your reason then just say that's your reason, rather than obscuring it behind excuses specific to the situation.
No, it’s not my reason for lying. It’s an attempt to change the feeling of “I’m lying” which can easily be detected on my face into a feeling of “I’m telling the truth”, which I can express easily.
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You might be able to take it a step further and say something like "if those Nazis were in their right minds then they wouldn't want to kill Jews." In practice I think it's easier to just say that lying is justified sometimes.
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The first circle of Hell is Limbo, and it is a place "of perfect natural felicity". That is, it is our world when all the bad things are solved - war, sickness, poverty, greed and so on. But it is without hope. It is deprived of the supernatural, of the vision of God which is what the enjoyment of the saved and blessed consists of.
It is true that the Church has softened on Limbo and really you never hear of it anymore today. But it was never formally a doctrine (something that has to be believed); rather, it was grappling with the problems of justice and mercy; if infants die before they can be baptised, how can they be condemned to Hell? What about the virtuous pagans and those who never got the chance to hear of God?
On the other hand, if you can be saved just by living a good life, then there was no need for the Incarnation and, crucially, the Crucifixion. If you can be saved without believing in Christ, without ever hearing of Him, then what does that mean for the Great Commission?
So Limbo was a technical solution: a human paradise (for the righteous but unsaved) without the supernatural.
Which is why Limbo, in the Divine Comedy, is on the outskirts of Hell and is a place of sadness, even though there is no pain or sickness or the rest of our earthly woes there. They can never enjoy the bliss of the Divine Vision. And why Purgatory, even though the souls there (by one reading) suffer pains as grievous as the damned in Hell, is a place of hope - because it is where the saved work off the earthly penalties for sin, before they go to Heaven (and it's not a matter of "second chance" or 'earning a place in Heaven' - the souls in Purgatory are already saved).
C.S. Lewis had a somewhat different take on it in his The Pilgrim's Regress, but he too took the view: a place not of suffering, except the suffering of being without hope.
I've often thought about the contrast here - we on earth want an earthly paradise, no more tears or grief or loss, Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism. And the Church says "yes, you can have that - but it's in the map of Hell, not of Heaven. You can have the secular ideal, but never the supernatural one."
And some people probably would be very happy with that bargain. I never watched The Good Place, but a while back there it was all over social media. And my understanding - SPOILERS - is that in the end, after uncounted millennia of perfect happiness, the characters finally choose non-existence because they've had it all. The writers seem to have presented that as the most desirable end, and not true eternity. But I think it's interesting that even there, the same message is in the water: without the supernatural, purely natural felicity will eventually pall and satiate.
it's very interesting how you recognized the problem at the heart of the show the good place without having seen it. i put off watching for years because the only thing i knew was its setting in heaven and i had doubts on how that was going to be handled. eventually i did watch it, all the way through but not as a binge, i enjoyed it until the ending.
the mistake ZHPL made, the same as @self_made_human, and one that's understandable but not in the best way from people who didn't watch it, is thinking it's an atheist work. if ZHPL did watch it and missed it, bad look. it is ostensibly atheist: heaven with no God, hell with no devil, what's going on? it makes no sense, to disregard God is to disregard the source of objectivity and in the context of a show about the domain of God it renders that show nonsense, it destroys everything. i don't mean this on a level of modern soullessness or even just logically. the grand narrative of the show has a God-shaped hole, it's nothing without it. thing is, the hole isn't supposed to be there.
imagine a fan cut of fight club. the sole purpose of the cut is removing the last reveal of tyler durden's identity. it would leave in everything it could without it being explicit that "pitt is norton's alter-ego." this cut would probably work well enough, it would seem off, like it was building to something and the bombings at the end don't quite resolve that feeling, but it'd have beginning middle and apparent end.
that's what happened with the good place. the show lacks the fundamental truth of the world of the story, and in a show about heaven and hell that can't just be skipped. michael schur is a smart guy, he wasn't ignoring this, it's there the whole time, i think the writers didn't know how schur intended for the show to end because schur didn't want to accidentally ruin the show with a cliched and bad ending.
i'm certain it was supposed to end one of these ways:
the whole show was eleanor in purgatory. the ending was going to be her realizing something was still missing, but how can heaven be missing something? so we get the final twist: she's still not in heaven, she was never in heaven, and what she's missing is God. she'd pass through the door, find herself in actual heaven, and meet God.
reality in the show--hell, mundane, divine--is a simulation, and when eleanor passed through the door at the end she would have met those running the simulation.
the season 1 finale is famous and the narratively perfect bookend with the s4 series finale would be her meeting God, or "god", contrast with the dissonant ending we get. ZHPL criticizes parts of the show as escalating soullessness, like the character of the judge, but it's so obvious as meta-level escalating absurdity. schur takes it farther and farther into nonsense to the point the judge character is as good as schur screaming at the audience "You still don't get it! The characters still don't understand what's actually going on! They still don't see the fundamental truth!" The first intended ending has to be done perfectly or it nukes the show's legacy. The second is the choice if he can't pull off the first, but then it becomes the "too smart for its own good" ending.
schur went with door to oblivion, why risk the legacy of it-was-all-a-dream-ing his show? but that's the problem with the good place: it's so damn obvious it was all a dream.
I don't think I ever claimed it was an atheist work, I'm entirely agnostic on the point!
I can easily see a "Cultural Christian", someone who mouths the words but doesn't actually have anything but belief in belief, concoct such a bad story.
I don't know the actual religious orientation of the writers, but what I'm getting at is that I can see a self-professed "Christian" writing it.
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That's basically right, in the show, heaven is a big adult jungle gym where you run around amusing yourself for eternity. It turns out it's hell because everyone there gets bored and lazy. The main characters reform it by adding a suicide door. I thought it was actually a decently written show but it never deserved its reputation for being philosophically deep. The writers couldn't imagine anything more blissful than eating at restaurants, going to parties, taking vacations and eventually being euthanized. The highest form of happiness they could conceive of was the life of an upper middle class retiree. It's so much more banal than a heaven where you spend eternity contemplating the face of God. It reminds me of Chesterton's quote about how the problem with atheism isn't so much that it's wrong but that it's small.
You lost me here; what does this mean? This sounds even more banal than eating at restaurants and going to parties.
The short answer is: Love.
The Beatific Vision is inexhaustible because it can never be fully known or totally comprehended even by an immortal intellect. Only God can fully know God. But we love that which is the best and highest, and we are loved, and love is never satisfied by any amount of enjoyment:
I don't believe in a God whose ultimate purpose for his children is for us to become lotus-eaters, regardless of how tasty the lotus is.
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I'd say it's because it envisions a being so superhuman that you'd never want to do anything else but worship it and be loved by it. That's just a much more interesting concept to me than cruise ship heaven. It's less self centered. It's not something I can immediately imagine so it feels more right for an afterlife.
I'm not saying the show should have depicted that afterlife in particular. It could have gone with something else, but it still shouldn't have been a carbon copy of earth. Or if they did decide to do the "heaven is like a cruise ship" concept then they should address the short comings head on. They depicted a universe where humans have immortal souls that are inherently unhappy being immortal. That's pretty depressing when you think about it but they never addressed that and just acted like the suicide booth is a perfect happy ending.
I think there's a difference between a more interesting concept and one that would actually be more interesting to live. "endless nothingness" is a more interesting concept to me than cruise ship heaven.
Agreed about The Good Place. Though really I'd be happy with cruise ship heaven too; there would be so much to learn and do. Heaven being nihilist and hedonistic doesn't force you to become that way.
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How does "less self centered" turn into "more interesting"?
And how is this less self-centered anyway? If it's something that you want to worship, that's still something that you want.
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War ? War is what created man and what created civilization.
We'd be nothing but bugs without war.
The suffering modern man experiences because he has been deprived of war and struggle is rather evident.
War destroys lies, reveals all the cards. It's truly horrible but like most others, we are a horrible species and pretending otherwise is useless in the face of historical record.
War is where we're at our most buglike.
You can't even find insects that hunt cooperatively.
I do not see how this is true, much less relevant.
I'll expand. War is where you go to die for the benefit of the hive (that's the best case - oftentimes the hive as a whole is not the beneficiary, only the elites are).
War is where propaganda is at its heaviest and most blatant in retrospect. Men will not go to war without this memetic attack pheromone.
That the modern man "suffers without war" is a) not really true and b) he isn't without war. You have a rich pick of various noble causes all over the world: I suggest the recent little proxy operation in Eastern Europe. In the (I assume) rather unlikely event that the system around you prevents you from joining any organized conflict, go to war against the system.
If your objection is that men are no longer forced to go to war, my reply is thus: then suffer.
I trust you are unfamiliar with the effects of war on rates of mental illness ?
I'll make your formulation more precise. Men who have been raised by women, in a civilized environment will not go to war without a lot of propaganda. Well, most of them.
Deaths due to warfare were traditionally higher in elite classes. Also in recent conflicts officers casualty rates are usually higher than that of enlisted.
Men aren't bugs. A bug would go fight a tank and get squashed.
Once the system is weak enough, things will get more interesting.
For example, this hateful[1] French savage[3] racist colonizer[2] is advising his people to not fight the rioters, but let the rioters educate the Boomers who kept them as pets. Wait till his enemies weaken each other, and then reconsider. Can you find bugs doing even elementary tactics of this kind of the "let them kill each other so I can finish off the weaker victor" ?
[1]see the link
[2]married to a Congolese woman.
[3]just look at the tattoos
Based on what I can tell - I much prefer the warless rates of illness, mental and physical. I, for one, am not in any particular need of Higher Purpose(tm).
..apart from societies engaged in perpetual warfare - Israel, modern humans don't even breed sustainably.
Israel is the only place in the world where non-religious , university education women have more than 2.1 children on average-
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Really? Ants and wasps are a thing.
Yeah, but they don't hunt cooperatively? Nah. And they aren't intelligent anyway.
So if you were to step in an ant hill, all of the ants biting your feet would not be cooperating with eachother? I think the analogy you chose fails to illustrate what you want it to.
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I read an excellent review dissecting the rather bankrupt worldview underpinning The Good Place somewhere, but can't really recall where that was. It might even have been the Motte.
It absolutely makes me seethe when I imagine people being given the gift of immortality (or merely a very long and indefinite lifespan, like we're talking astronomical figures here) be such utter nonces about it, and succumb so quickly to boredom and ennui.
A modern human living say, 80 years or so is nowhere near done trawling the vast expanse of interesting environments, ideas, people or concepts that even our limited baseline human minds can experience. The reason most people today might possibly lose the will to live is their bodies failing them, such that they can't actually get out there and do more of it without it being infeasibly difficult or painful.
I fully support the right of any sane sapient entity to self-terminate for any reason it chooses (without classifying the desire for suicide as insanity itself), but even then I can only groan at the sheer lack of vision or imagination that involves.
Mere millennia are grossly insufficient to do or feel all the things worth sticking around for, and humans consistently expand that space faster than we can consume it already. As evidence, go find the last person who read every book worth reading, it's certainly centuries ago, and maybe half a millennia.
To them I say:
How dare you get bored when you have everything you need, when billions of your ancestors fought hard against the cold to bring Utopia to you? You ungrateful fucks, if you haven't outlived a few stars, what makes you so old and world-weary that you'd rather end it all?
And even if you have, and after about 20 billion years your brain has cycled through every possible interesting thought and emotion available to grey matter (or a simulation of it) constrained to 20 watts and the volume of a cranium, have you even considered expanding your horizons and augmenting your consciousness so you can find new and amazing exercises to do?
A human being has exponentially more pleasant (or at least interesting) experiences and thoughts at their disposal compared to a chimp, and the larger your brain equivalent, the faster the combinatorial equations explode.
Try upping a couple hundred IQ points or petaflops of computational power and then try again you weakling.
Fine, your computational substrate has exceeded the size and mass limits that make it inevitably collapse into a blackhole? And your cumulative lifespan needs to be expressed in Knut Arrow notation? You get a hall pass to off yourself knowing you've known everything to know and seen it all. Don't talk to me till you're there, because I'd kill to be.
Even the latter belongs to the unlikely scenario where humanity solves everything, including infinite energy and resources. You're not going to get there in practice with merely all the matter and energy in the observable universe.
And mere boredom has technological solutions, I'd happily undergo a procedure that could erase it if I was convinced that it was outright counterproductive. Or I'd erase my memories and start again, anything but consigning to oblivion this infinitely lucky instance of sapience that was fished out from the endless ocean of All Possible Minds to enjoy its day in the sun.
The writers of The Good Place are small minded scum crying sour grapes at a prospect they'd be far too lucky to actually experience. I'd even deny it to them on principal if I was feeling mean.
It was probably this one from ZeroHPLovecraft, which someone recommended here pretty recently.
That is indeed the one, as much as I might dislike a lot of his politics, I can't deny the man has a consistent ability to churn out bangers. Thank you.
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Quite right. How can all these authors diss immortality? They've never even tried it! Nobody's tried it.
Our revealed preference is to spend enormous amounts of time and effort extending our lifespans in the health sector, despite rapidly diminishing returns in quality of life. Our revealed preference (or at least the revealed preference of governments and thought leaders) was to make considerable sacrifices during COVID lest a few years be shaved off the lifespans of geriatrics and the obese.
It's hypocritical to be so contemptuous of immortality when we go to such huge effort for far lesser fruits.
Likewise, it would be great if we could 100x or 1000x the population. More people means more and better artistic output. I know I'm preaching to the choir with you but there's a fairly large cult of 'growth must slow' when it's the opposite that we need. There's a great deal of unused real estate on Earth - tundra, deep ocean, desert, ice and massively more in the rest of the Solar System.
It's the ultimate sour grapes. We can never have it, so we must convince ourselves that we don't really want it. I do believe sour grapes is a perfectly rational and healthy response to impossible desires, however.
The crux is that there's no reason to assume that immortality (in the sense that you don't die except for external accidents or violence) isn't clearly plausible. At least it is to me based off what I know about biology, assuming only modest advances in biotech. At the very least, aging is almost certainly a curable disease!
When you get into the realm of mind uploads, you can trivially guarantee a form of you making it to Heat Death if you regularly fork and hide copies of yourself all throughout the universe where nobody can get to them.
I wouldn't say that going sour grapes is a good response either, when you can simply say that "yeah, that would be nice but it's not happening so no need to dwell on it".
I acknowledge that it is theoretically possible, but it's also been "30 years away" for much longer than that. I don't think anyone on this forum will be living past 2150. And yes, being able to accept the truth with equanimity would be better than self-delusion, but our powers of self-delusion are very strong, so we may as well get some use out of them.
I mean, I evidently disagree! From my understanding of biology (which ought to be better than average, or I've wasted 7 years of my life), aging doesn't seem fundamentally intractable at all. I'd be hard pressed to think of anyone other than the other doctor here, and perhaps @ChristPrattAlphaRaptor who might know more, though I don't know if gerontology and SENS is anything he's interested in.
If I had to put semi-serious numbers on it, I'd say that most people under 30 have a 70-80% chance of reaching longevity escape velocity (when your life expectancy grows faster than you age), in the counterfactual world where AGI doesn't become a reality.
Now, I sincerely expect AGI to become a thing more likely than not, and within a decade at most, at which point it's a tossup as to whether it gives us immortality and catgirl blowjobs, or kills us all.
At any rate, I have no qualms about claiming that a superhuman AGI should trivially be able to solve the problem, not that I really want to take that risk until I'm already old and doddering haha
I can't see it. Increases in average lifespan haven't translated into increases in maximum lifespan (Aeschylus lived to 92 in ~400 B.C., that's still longer than most American men today). It seems to be no low hanging fruit. Diseases that were easily treatable are becoming more and more resistant to antibiotics, and development of new ones has slowed down. Maybe that will pick up again, maybe it won't. More than immortality, dying of a hyper-MRSA infection after a difficult surgery in late middle age seems a likely outcome to me. Of course, I'm not a doctor or a biologist.
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Do you not have enough already?
Of course I am totally opposed to this view of art as a fungible good in the first place - this view that one can simply request "more art" in the way that one might request more bananas or more toothpaste. But even if that is your view of art, I can't see how you would be dissatisfied right now. There's already more art than can fit in one lifetime.
There's more art than I can consume, yet it's not really good, first-rate stuff that appeals to me greatly as opposed to only a little.
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I can think of a few reasons more art is better, even though we already cannot consume all existing art:
More art means more good art. 1000x the art doesn't just 1000x the low-brow stuff but also means 1000 top-quality world-changing pieces for every one which currently exists.
More art means more art in each genre and subgenre. Each teeny tiny hyperspecific subgenre of current art will look like a full genre with its own miniscule subgenres when there is more art. Fantasy will have more books in it than Fiction currently does, Medieval Fantasy will have more books than Fantasy currently does, and so on.
More art means more communication between artists. If there is 1000x the top-notch art out there, people have 1000x the good examples to emulate, which I think adds to the quality of each art piece. The field also presumably evolves faster with all the art coming out.
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I'm sure @RandomRanger agrees that it's not just art that would be the output of a grossly larger population, but also science and industry.
That being said, I for one have no qualms about saying that yes, there isn't enough art out there, at least of the quality I enjoy consuming.
There aren't enough good movies and video games, and current discovery mechanisms limit me from finding enough of the kind of literature I like to indefinitely satiate my appetite for such.
I'm sure we can manage without all the additional people if we really have to, because of AI doing cognitive labor in their place. That's replacing quantity for quality to a degree.
I think we're pretty much post-scarcity for high quality artistic imagery as early as Midjourney V4. Not quite there when it comes to novels, movies, games or music, though the last is incipient as AI musicians become prevalent and continue improving. I give 30% odds that GPT-5 can write a novella I would enjoy reading, while 4 can't.
My reaction upon reading this is, I assume, the same as the reaction you have when you see "unironic endorsement of degrowth": slack-jawed befuddlement.
The suggestion that not only are we suffering from a paucity of good art (which may be partially true, but it would be true for me in a sense that's different from yours), but that the way to rectify this problem is to ask Midjourney to draw certain representational images, is... really quite remarkable.
In spite of the depth of our disagreement, I do sincerely appreciate you being here to articulate these views, really. I would hate to have to discuss these matters in an echo chamber.
Oh, there's plenty of good art out there (at least, in self_made_human's sense). Midjourney makes it cheaper.
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Depends on what you're looking to get out of art? I don't care much about the artist's intentions, only what emotional response it provokes in me.
AI art is certainly capable of being pretty, and right now with proper prompting it can also be compelling, and further when LLMs get even better at prompting, you can cut all the humans out of the loop and still have art that appeals to my sensibilities.
I'm sure you can agree that it's at least pretty and technically competent! Most human art doesn't meet that standard, just look at DeviantArt.
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By all means, preach to the choir, they're going to be in attendance by default haha.
It does deeply reassure me that that people like you exist, who I consider fundamentally sane in a manner that makes me willing to tolerate a great deal of discord in other fundamental values when we see eye to eye on the really big ones (not that I'm aware of such differences!)
Decrying immortality is the epitome of luxury beliefs, since nobody really has a glaring example of it that can be shoved in their face. I'd like to see their hypocritical walkbacks when they begin to argue that no, it's different this time, and we didn't actually mean to dunk on immortality now that it's on sale.
I like what you mean by fundamentally sane, it fits a concept I've been thinking about but couldn't articulate. There are a lot of people who have bizarre ideas about what could be possible visions of the future. I recall an exchange on twitter. Someone like Roko or Alexander Kruel was saying 'oh we could easily fit a trillion people on Earth based on these technical factors' and one of the trad-rightists said something like 'so what, that has nothing to do with the good life, they aren't needed to be squires or knights in the small bands of bodybuilders roaming across the American plains on horseback'.
On the left there are those EcoSophia declining-efficiency of energy production people who think peak oil will eventually result in civilization collapsing down to mid 19th century level forever and that this is a good thing, since it'll reduce human arrogance and get us more in touch with the environment. I particularly dislike the psychoanalytic tone they take, saying that nuclear power and so on is a cope that people clutch to so they can hold onto their preferred incarnation of decadent modernity. The figures don't bear that out.
Now there are all kinds of formidable technical and socio-political problems in achieving our vision of the good life, sovereignty amongst posthumans. I think it's a very long shot, that there are competitive pressures that lead to autocracy or monopoly of a very few. Yet we can't turn back now and play Cowboys and Indians or Trad Farmers. There is no going back, no unilateral disarmament of industry, wealth and power. Much as I might prefer that AI development be paused for many decades so that we can upgrade ourselves steadily and establish a solid political/technical/social foundation, I recognize that it's not practical to hold back, competition won't allow it.
The bodybuilders on horseback would get pummelled by riflemen circa 1870, let alone the drone swarms of 2070. If their vision of the future doesn't include massively more technology than we have now, they're going to get crushed. Likewise with immortality and massive cognitive enhancements. If they're even on offer, we're doing well.
As one of the people who most commonly link to Ecosophia on this site, I don't believe you have an accurate understanding of the claims being made. The first reason is your placing of Ecosophia on the left - where exactly on the left does pro-Trump Burkean conservatism lie? Your post here isn't just counter to what JMG actually believes but I believe it contains a misreading that he was complaining about having to clear up back in 2011, specifically the idea that the collapse will be sudden or immediately noticeable, like a sharp fall off a cliff which leaves us back in the 19th century forever (though I freely admit I may be misinterpreting you here).
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2011-01-20/onset-catabolic-collapse/
JMG has not been talking about the coming zombie apocalypse where a giant cataclysm completely and dramatically upends the existing order of things - the Long Descent lies outside the "apocalypse/star trek" dichotomy that's so prevalent in modern society. And on the topic of technology, here are some of his actual words on the subject.
https://unherd.com/2022/03/we-are-the-authors-of-our-decline/
Look at what happened to the technology of past civilisations that ended up collapsing. Some Roman architecture still stands to this day, and plenty of the advancements that were made during the Empire were preserved and helped make sure that the dark ages afterwards were a bit more tolerable. The collapse of Rome didn't leave humanity doomed to pre-Roman technology for all time, and the collapse of modern Western civilisation won't do the same either. It's highly likely that bicycles and a lot of the other technology we've developed will be used well into the future, assuming that those skills and ideas are preserved through the decline.
More importantly, the collapse that JMG has been writing about for the last two decades isn't some far-off "eventually" - it is happening now, right outside our windows. In huge swathes of the US you can just look outside and see exactly what he's talking about. To wit:
The collapse of Rome was not evenly and equally distributed - the Byzantines kept on going for quite some time, and it is highly likely that parts of the modern west will do the same. On that note, you've also missed one of the other central points of his hypothesis - that another civilisation will eventually be born on the other side of the dark ages we're headed towards. The fall or collapse of a civilisation is not a permanent end to human history, but another iteration of a process that we have an increasingly accurate understanding of.
I agree with you about what he predicts I think, it's just that it's hard to summarize a quasi-ideology in a single sentence. A lot is riding on the 'eventually' in my sentence. I did read a couple of posts from him where he says 'no the collapse won't be sharp but a steady decline, perhaps accelerating at some points under various competitive pressures'. Also, is he not on the left? I thought the whole 'archdruid' thing and a fairly anti-capitalist tint shone through his work, along with the ecological emphasis. Maybe left-right isn't so clear with these unusual ideologies. Also, since when was he pro-Trump? I never saw anything like that.
This is just bad management of resources and bad politics. If the US decided to criminalize drug dealing as opposed to leaving these festering open-air drug markets... If the US and most of the West wasn't 'investing' in inefficient renewables as opposed to nuclear energy... If the US and West generally didn't decide to send our manufacturing base overseas to China...
Look at the actual predictions he made from the 2011 link:
And then we had the fracking boom! US oil production reached a record high in 2019, contra Greer. Likewise with global oil production. COVID hit and then we had the war in Ukraine which have thrown things out of whack, yet these crises don't stem from energy problems, they stem from human stupidity in geopolitics and biomedical research. The West's leaders have been working around the clock to sabotage the fossil fuel industry, shut down pipelines like Keystone, ban exploration, shut down power plants, impose punitive taxes, engage in lawfare against coal mines.
I said that civilization would collapse down to 19th century standards, I got the sense that he predicted permanent stagnation. Did he not deride all alternate energy sources, including nuclear, as cope? What is left to build back on if there's no fossil fuels, nuclear or anything? Hydro alone seems rather limited. You can definitely maintain civilizations with 19th century tech, use charcoal and so on. Yet technological civilizations like ours need more power IMO.
Anyway, my primary disagreement with him is that we are not short of energy. There's plenty of uranium and thorium if only we bother to use 50-year old, simple technologies like breeder reactors, if only we get rid of all the red tape that slows down construction. The state-sponsored sabotage of nuclear energy is staggering - see https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop
Likewise, sulphate aerosols could reverse climate change in a matter of years, if only we chose to deploy them.
Nuclear energy is actually cheaper than coal for electricity in technical terms, it's just that we choose to make it more expensive. More broadly, all the time we're finding new efficiencies, new sources of power, new ways to accelerate development. Fracking is just one example. Peak oil was supposed to come in 1974, 2006, then 2011, it still hasn't come and it won't mean anything more than 'peak whale oil' ever did when it does come, since we'll be onto gas, nuclear fission and fusion, or solar if it ever becomes economically viable. That is, provided our leaders are wise enough to do their jobs correctly, as opposed to flailing around like children. That's what was going on with Rome and Byzantium, their energy sources were stable but their leadership became incompetent.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-01-21/donald-trump-and-the-politics-of-resentment/
https://www.ecosophia.net/the-kek-wars-part-one-aristocracy-and-its-discontents/
I am honestly surprised that you have read his work at all if those are the conclusions you drew from it. His articles about Trump were some of his most popular and he wrote an entire book on the subject (a good read, in my opinion). Yes, he does care about the environment, but that's not really unexpected for Burkean conservatives and was in fact traditional for conservatism for a large portion of history. He quite literally has a Master Conserver certificate, and Conservation and Conservatism both share a root word after all.
"If the US decided" - how exactly is that going to happen? The political deadlock and inability of the state to solve these problems ARE collapse! Yes, the US government could just decide to turn around and fix a lot of the problems that society is facing, but this is like saying alcoholism is easy to fix - after all, one just needs to stop drinking and the problem is gone. There's a galaxy of competing interests and power-politics that get in the way of actually resolving the hard problems that face complex societies, and this gridlock is one of the common features of declining empires.
Allow me to quote the man himself on the topic:
Fracking isn't a new technology - when Greer spoke about and evaluated his predictions, he mentioned that he didn't expect the flurry of financial gimmicks that ended up allowing the fracking boom to take place. That said I don't have a citation for this one, and I can't find the evaluation he did because it is on his older, archived blog.
He did not predict permanent stagnation at all - and in fact he even points out that the ragged curve of decline will include periods of recovery and prosperity as society is forced to reduce energy expenditures. As for deriding nuclear, yes he did... and while I would very much like him to be wrong, I haven't seen any evidence that he is.
https://www.ecosophia.net/beyond-the-peak/
Show me the functioning nuclear power plant that generates energy in a sustainably profitable way (this includes taking waste handling into account) and I'll be overjoyed and freely admit that he was wrong. Oh, and remember that if you are trying to make a proposal for a future plant you can't just instantly vaporise the existing US government and replace them with a squad of enlightened technocrats - if you want to get rid of that regulation you have to explain how you're going to do that from within the confines of the current political system, and all the graft and corruption that entails.
The same renewable energy sources that powered every empire before the age of fossil fuel usage and extraction - the sun, human and animal muscle, hydro, wind and a few others. You're right when you say that technological civilizations like ours need more power - which means that when we no longer have that power, we no longer have the technological civilization like ours. Renewable energy is indeed unable to power an incredibly wasteful and environmentally ruinous society like our current one, but being unable to support modern society doesn't mean they're useless. Of course the problem is that in order to achieve a smooth transition to renewables the date we have to start making the change is, iirc, about 1974 - but while we've missed that boat, renewables will definitely play a part in the future.
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Unironic endorsement of degrowth is something that makes me doubt my own sanity when I read it, because it strikes me as requiring a deeply broken model of the world to not even see how much all of the technology and progress we take for granted is pushed along by an abundance of cheap energy and an ever increasing number of minds who can employ that energy to new tasks.
At least in the case of those who acknowledge the horrors that would result from such activities and then accept them with open eyes, I can see that we simply have fundamental values differences, as much as I think of them irredeemably evil moral mutants from our perspective.
But worse are the OOMs larger number of useful idiots who enable them, the Extinction Rebellion advocates of the world, who think that we can slam the brakes on industry without ruining the QOL of the globe, any hope for a rising tide that raises the boat of the Global South, or even worse, the death of billions from starvation and fighting as the world goes from an iterated positive sum game where, grossly, the average person keeps doing better, to one that's outright negative sum in outlook.
At least the Powers that Be aren't particularly fond of them, for all that they're often bumbling idiots themselves. But you can never rest easy in a democratically run asylum where at any moment the inmates can vote themselves into power.
I wish I could say that the number of people explicitly oriented towards an optimistic vision of the future, like you, me or Kruel, who think that humanity deserves to do better, outnumber the kooks who fervently desire the opposite.
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"How dare you" is not an argument that works if you have no authority or power over those you are using it on. It's just empty rhetorical flourish.
It’s not clear that there’s any way to try to persuade people of your own terminal values outside of rhetorical flourishes.
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It is indeed added there as rhetorical flourish, empty or otherwise. I'm not legally obligated to be cold, dispassionate and clinical in my writing.
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Fuck me sideways, I wrote a massive essay and had it gobbled up into the ether when I received a phone call. @ZorbaTHut, is it too much to ask for text entered into a comment to be temporarily saved for a little while even if not posted? It would be a lifesaver on mobile.
Sigh, I'll rewrite it:
I think this is an excellent post, and it largely aligns with my view.
That being said:
It strikes me as deeply misguided if not outright pathological to extend modern intuitions about the need for "responsibility" to a distant future where the universe is plausibly dominated by entities akin to Matrioshka Brains or computationally oriented Dyson Swarms that monopolize the resources of entire star systems each. That's fetishizing responsibility for the love of responsibility, entirely divorced from whether it's needed for other terminal goals.
Such entities are robustly self-sufficient and powerful in their domain to a degree that the modern mind finds hard to comprehend.
Our intuitions about responsibilities have been built up over a lengthy evolutionary period where no man was an island to himself (the closest that ever was to being feasible was hunter gatherer times and even then it was deeply suboptimal).
We currently need each other to live fulfilling lives, and not even the wealthiest billionaire can setup a system that lets them divorce themselves from the rest of humanity.
This will be categorically untrue in the future, because interstellar trade, to the extent it exists, will be primarily of information and not physical goods.
It seems to me that there is very little that such an entity can't make entirely by itself, be it through normal resource collection, transmutation of matter, or direct energy to matter conversion.
Further, the absolutely colossal distances between star systems makes trade of anything that is not extremely high value economically infeasible, at least if you want to receive the goods in non-astronomical time frames.
I refuse to shackle such beings with our norms, and the maximal set of things we recognize today as "responsibilities" that I expect them to adhere to are:
A commitment to avoiding coercion when positive sum trade is available. Don't violate the NAP in short, since you're already a largely post-scarcity entity (even if scarcity is unlikely to be obviated entirely over cosmological timespans unless we invent literally infinite energy sources).
Don't trash the cosmic commons, say by throwing relativistic debris about that could plausibly ruin someone else's day as an RKV. Further, entities should avoid being wasteful where possible, for a very relaxed notion of waste, and when they ruin their cosmic endowment they should not expect others to bail them out without cause.
Drawing on the above, they ought to avoid intentionally creating negative externalities in general, such as creating unaligned superintelligences that they can't control, though such a task is unlikely to be difficult to a being superintelligent itself. Nobody wants a nasty case of a Hegemonizing Swarm even if it's unlikely to be a real threat, at least don't let them burn pristine star systems.
Such entities simply do not need much from each other, albeit they are capable of wanting a great deal.
Further, they are sovereign, to a degree that exceeds the fevered dreams of modern nation states and their leaders. You will have a very bad time getting them to do things they don't voluntarily want to do.
They're also almost certainly strongly godlike, beyond the ken of most conceptions of godliness we have today. Zeus's lighting bolts have nothing on a Nicoll-Dyson beam or an RKV. Sure, not omnipotent, but as close as physically feasible.
I myself wish to become such a Peer of the Universe, such that no worm turns or sparrow falls without my consent within my domain.
Now, if lesser beings still share the cosmos, they might find our conceptions of responsibility to be of some utility, and once we have actually robust means of memetic engineering, unlike the paltry and inadequate systems of schooling and cultural indoctrination we have today, I expect them to be used right until they're no longer needed.
At any rate, such gods might nod approvingly at Von Neumann when he says:
And like it or not, they shall control a great deal indeed..
Biggest unintended loophole since the Commerce Clause? Today people trade, so the Copenhagen Theory of Ethics kicks in, and then we feel we have carte blanche to coercively micromanage the results. In the future people trade, so they get to the Pareto frontier and the "no more positive sum trade is available" condition kicks in, and then we explicitly can coercively micromanage the results...
I'd have been more rigorous if I thought a comment made today actually served as a constitutional document for entities living thousands if not millions of years im the future haha
(Founding Fathers of America, I feel your pain!)
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I'm not sure if you're simply reiterating your disagreement here, or if the view that I was describing is so foreign to your own thinking that it does not even appear to you as a view; instead it appears as a non-view, as nonsense.
To take an accounting of all your commitments and goals, to reflect on which ones are "needed" and which aren't, to have the freedom to add or remove values and rearrange their relative priority: all this is, obviously, to still remain within the logic of consequentialism. I am raising the question of something that is outside of consequentialism altogether.
The response to the accusation that this view loves responsibility for its own sake is simply yes_chad.jpg. It's not an objection; it's just a restatement of the view itself. You are free to call this "fetishization" if you want. I don't view that term in any way as disparaging. We all have our fetishes, after all (such as your fascination with vast timescales and regions of space, for example).
I try not to attribute disagreement to fundamental values differences unless I can no longer help it. If that's the case, we either all agree to live and let live, or there will inevitably be bloodshed.
Mostly the former as far as I can gauge. I recognize it as a view at the very least, but I don't think it's really reflective of a fundamental underlying difference for the majority who espouse it. They simply don't have horizons as broad as mine, and have never stopped to really think of the ramifications of that approach when extended out of the circumstances that are mundane to us today.
After all, if I was asked whether inculcating certain kinds of responsibility today is something I endorse, I'd say yes. I'm not against the concept, I'm just against thoughtlessly extending it to where the intuitions underpinning it become irrelevant.
And I (probably) wouldn't have discussed the extremal case of utter atomization that a galactic scale civilization involves if you hadn't invoked the kind of thinking that leads to it or hints at it. Namely:
In my eyes: Superhuman AI - - > Space Colonization of some description is a link so robust that I struggle to think of anyone accumulating evidence to persuade me otherwise.
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I actually don't know of any way to implement it easily, as far as I know we'd have to be doing frequent callbacks to update some saved serverside field. Can you name any websites that do this? I can at least take a look at how they're doing it.
(this is honestly a thing web browsers should be doing, but they aren't)
You can save drafts client side, via the local storage API.
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Can't you use local storage for this?
If anything I would think storing everything you enter into fields server side is bad for a whole host of reasons.
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Beat's me! The closest I can think of is something like Google Docs that automatically saves your text as you go, and I don't know how taxing that will be to either implement for dev-time or resource reasons.
To spitball from a position of ignorance, perhaps have a "draft" feature someone can enable, which preserves text input server-side for a short duration? I can't imagine even an OOM more saved text will be taxing on the servers, but I could be wrong.
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Store it in cookies, or local storage. If the Storage variable is not empty, paste it into the comment form. Clear the variable on sucessful send.
They sort of do. If you lose your post because you clicked a link, you can usually recover it just with the "back" button.
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I don't think this is a new observation. "Rationalism" in as much as it is a coherent ideology (it isn't) is postmodern. Certainly 'neoreaction', which is arguably closer to the dominant political philosophy on this subreddit rather than Bay Area rationalism, is fundamentally postmodern and as far as I'm aware Moldbug agrees that it is. Many people here are fans of The Last Psychiatrist, the quintessential postmodernist niche online cultural commentary blog of the late Bush - early Obama era.
And besides, even in the mid 20th century it was very common to acknowledge that conservative intellectuals like Oakeshott and Strauss were essentially postmodernists. Most importantly, on the left the largest and most popular (and most regular) criticism of postmodernism (particularly Derrida and Deleuze) was that they were all secret reactionaries, or at least that the logical conclusion of postmodern political philosophy was an implicit small-c conservatism.
If postmodernism is fundamentally a rejection of grand narratives as per Lyotard, then that leaves room for all kinds of other, smaller narratives in their place. Some would call that a form of conservatism, especially given that liberalism / progressivism / leftism is/are far more reliant on grand narratives than reactionary ideologies - particularly non-Christian/Abrahamic reactionary ideologies - are.
@HlynkaCG is correct in saying that large parts of the internet right are postmodernists, but this doesn't mean they're not rightists.
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