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What does the light at the end of the tunnel look like?
Look, every now and then I stop watching my footfalls and get pensive. And one of the things I've gotten pensive about the past few days is this: the Western culture war is not going to last forever, which means it's going to end. And when it does, how will we look back on this mad time?
Two of the answers are obvious:
But what I can't really put together is the third option, the narrative that will be told if SJ is indeed just a passing phase, either because Red/Grey defeated it or because it wins and then turns out to be unsustainable. Frankly, the Blue Tribe's been writing all the history books since before I was born, so it's hard for me to even picture it. And that troubles me; it's the scenario I think is most likely, and the one I'm to at least some extent trying to bring about, so if I don't have a good idea of what it even looks like that's kind of an HCF. "It is not enough to say that you do not like the way things are. You must say how you will change them, and to what."
So, how will the people in that scenario think of this time? What story will they tell?
(To the SJers here: feel free to answer, if you think you understand your opposition, or feel free to correct me if you think my #2 is uncharitable.)
I'll go ahead and guess: it will look explicitly and seriously religious.
To me the social history of the last few decades, and indeed the last few centuries, is that of a hollowing out and lack of seriousness in religious practices and traditions. While there have been revivals here and there, the overall trend has been to become more and more secular as modern 'philosophy' and science becomes more powerful. When Descartes completely threw out Aristotelean formal causes, and claimed the Mind was totally separate from the body and physical reality, he unwittingly destroyed the way humans made sense of the world and each other from time immemorial.
At this point I'm convinced that modern philosophy, specifically post-Cartesian philosophy that sees materialism as the ultimate truth and the universe as nothing more than meaningless particles bouncing into each other, cannot coexist with human society. Either we will destroy our societies through increasing social fragmentation, or the transhumanists will get their wish and change the fundamental way human beings interact with each other to paper over the problems of a materialist philosophy. Perhaps both will happen.
Either way, Social Justice has become such a force because it attempts to fill the gap left by the absence of sincere religions, and just like previous 'isms' and secular ideologies, it is doomed to fail because these sorts of religious systems just can't work in a materialist universe. For better or worse, humans need to believe in purpose and meaning beyond dead matter in order to cohere together in large social groups. If we can't have that, well, we will burn it all down.
Personally I think Christianity will rise again to rule the day, at least on a religious level. It has died many times before and come back from the grave - that motif being the mythological bedrock upon which the entire enterprise is founded is no coincidence. The primary, hidden strength of Christ's gospel is the fact that it gives hope in the darkest of times, and promises a renewal and escape from death.
When? The reconquista?
The reformation and counter-reformation probably did lead to increases in popular piety in certain areas. The Islamic world is much more religious than it was 50 years ago. America had a massive revival in the early 19th century leading to more-or-less permanently higher religiosity than Europe.
Contra Dag, I think Christianity is in rapid and terminal decline, especially in America.
America is incredibly un-Christian. Its foreign policy prioritizes promoting LGBT, defending Christians is ignored. Nearly a million abortions per year. Gay marriage, Pride parades. A world-class pornography and casual sex industry with all the top brands - Pornhub, Tinder, Grindr. Breakdown in the family: more born to unmarried parents than to married. Intense materialism that largely overtakes the religious essence of the holidays.
I can't think of any Christian value or doctrine that the US particularly exemplifies, as a state. There are certainly Christian lobby groups and pockets of devout Christians but they're largely insignificant to the state, if not actively despised. Can anyone call the US a Christian country? Are Christians in control? Are Christians capable of anything more than legal tomfoolery like making people drive to another state to get an abortion?
See the 'Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence' being invited to the Dodgers game - what kind of Christian country has explicitly and intensely anti-Christian groups being invited and legitimized at popular events? They'd be lucky to escape with their lives if they tried that in an Islamic country. Look how angry the Islamic world got over quran-burnings in Sweden, that's what real religiosity looks like.
Compare the fervour of Christians in the US to LGBT, BLM, trans, climate change. Even white supremacists can find more men willing to kill and die for their beliefs than Christians can. The latter ideologies possess much more power, they are acknowledged or feared by the state, they drive debate.
Sure, there are those statistics that say 70% of the US is Christian but what is the point if their beliefs don't seem to have any effect on the state or national culture? If they can't wield state power, if they can't cancel, if they can't get the obsequious submission of the big corporations what good are they?
US still has double the church attendance of Western Europe.
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Global South is the new dominant Christian sphere. There's a shift in emphasis from the West, and if the forthcoming years are going to be non-white, the new missionaries will be African and Asian clergy coming to reconvert Europe.
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I got curious about this claim, so I headed down to the US State Department webpage. Current topics of main concern seem to be, in addition to the predictable Middle East and Ukraine focuses, to be climate, health and terrorism (and, notably, regarding the climate themes, the administration is talking a lot about increasing nuclear power capacities).
It was surprisingly hard to find anything talking about LGBT issues; I guess those would fall under the purview of the "Human Rights and Democracy" policy category, but browsing five pages of statements, the only one that, by title, was related to his was a short boilerplate statement on Transgender Day of Remembrance. After using search, I found out that Dept of State has a special LGBTQI+ envoy but what she does, apart from travelling to various events for representation, remains a bit of a mystery.
State Dept also has an Office of International Religious Freedom, which doesn't seem to be one of the more important offices around, but still has issued a number of statements defending the religious freedom of Christians (as a group and individually), like this one, this one and this one.
On the basis of this exercise, neither seems to be a particular priority for US foreign policy, as expressed by its State Department.
I was thinking more of the Biden memo, or Blinken talking about how he hectors the Saudis on LGBT.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/16/blinken-i-press-saudis-on-lgbtqi-issues-every-time-00040325
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2021/02/04/memorandum-advancing-the-human-rights-of-lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender-queer-and-intersex-persons-around-the-world/
There's no equivalent 'defending Christianity' memo, nor do dozens of US embassies make use of Christian symbolism like they do LGBT symbolism.
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I’d take that bet.
Postmodernism exists because you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. Any competing philosophy is judged not on its own, but as commentary on any antecedents. And in the Information Age, such influences are very easy to identify, at which point they can be dusted off and used as weapons.
It’s not a symmetric battleground, either. Discontent is much easier to catalogue—to commodify—than experiences of the sublime. No one talks about how Jonestown cultists felt in the weeks leading up to their suicides. Instead, the cultural touchstone is a sarcastic reminder not to drink the Flavor-Aid.
On a materialist battleground, how does religion get an advantage? The current frontrunner is probably that sentiment expressed by “yeschad.jpg”. It’s a call to disregard the back-and-forth commentary and just…do obviously correct things. When combined with a self-justifying source of correctness, I.e. a holy text, this has a competitive advantage against postmodern arguments. But it’s not scalable. You don’t build institutions by ignoring all forms of dispute resolution.
So I don’t believe that religion can make a comeback. Not so long as we remain connected to the firehose of information. It’s much better at delivering materialism than ephemera.
I think this is a bad model of what modern religion is or will aim to be. Which isn't to say it's better or even good, nor that Christians will be coming back to the forefront, but it's a recognizable pattern.
Thanks.
You’re right—the success of religion won’t hinge on lists of debunks or on refined apologetics. That’s not what people are really seeking, and it’s not going to dissuade the believer or convince the atheist. Such was the takeaway of the 00s.
What I failed to convey was that our dominant culture is categorically different from the ones which developed successful religions. Our default mode is a sort of detached, conversational skepticism where we compare and contrast against the corpus of existing ideas. It seeks novelty and abhors sincerity—except when it doesn’t, because fashion is fickle and sometimes what’s old is new again. I called this postmodernism, though that’s probably insufficient.
I think this mode of engagement favors entrenched systems over growing ones. The atheists get satisfied with a debunk and end up back in their comfortable ennui. The traditionalists get pulled off to whichever existing movement. The ironic radicals drift onwards to new heights of post-post irony, while the serious radicals fall into one of the existing big-ticket ideologies, because real *ism has never been tried. These attractor states suck the life out of new movements, and they do it faster than ever before. Any which survive are out there on the fringes, distrusted by a mainstream that takes pride in cynicism.
Perhaps I’ve gotten carried away. I have a high confidence in this theory as applied to media, where the market forces and the lust for novelty are a bit more dominant. My certainty is much lower when it comes to the appeal of religion, especially in light of your blogpost. It is a strange world out there.
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I was just pondering yesterday that we’re entering a time when a number of childless Millennials are passing 40 and probably going to feel a rather acute feeling of uselesness and search for meaning - no, not all of them but a number - and whether a number of those will be attracted by monastic life or some other type of a new religious calling - no, not all of them but a number.
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Islam seems like it's in a much better position than Christianity, at least to me. They have the highest birth rates, advocate for their own interests unapologetically, and have a long history of punishing and assassinating critics and opponents. This causes lots of internecine strife, but I predict these traits will allow rapid expansion within the West.
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Not gonna happen.
Nobody seriously defends the superstitions of Christianity, and while social movements can survive a large amount of inconsistency, all attempts at "cultural Christianity" have basically been failures due to the inherent contradictions. It's just a bridge too far to try to harness the culture of Christianity while ignoring the superstitions that underpin them, while also having people who do believe the superstitions loudly proclaim they're undeniable truths.
I'm your huckleberry
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The different bubbles that we are in fascinate me. If someone asked me, I would say that Christianity has never been more or better defended before now. In fact, I have heard a Catholic Bishop thank New Atheism for revitalizing Christian Apologetics.
The content coming out from Capturing Christianity, Jimmy Akin, and Bishop Barron is both sophisticated and unafraid to defend the foundational positions of Christianity, dive into thorny philosophical weeds, take atheistic arguments seriously, and approach topics from a scientific, rational perspective.
I can feel your disbelief across time and space, so let me give an example: In his video on "Time Travel Prayer," Jimmy Akin explains the methodology of a study where patient records from prior years were randomly assigned to a prayer group or control group. After praying for the patients in prayer group to have gotten better in the past, the researchers looked at the outcomes for the patients and found a statistically significant correlation between the prayer group and recovery.
Despite this result supporting his argument, he took the time in his show to talk about how studies can be done hundreds of times, with only the results that the researchers like getting published. And that this practice can make even random chance look statistically significant on paper. And that, though he has no evidence this happened in this case, it is important to keep in mind when papers shows weak significance around surprising things.
Sounds a lot like how a rationalist would approach a topic, no? I highly recommend checking out Jimmy Akin's Mysterious world - most of the topics are not religious in nature but they are a lot of fun. He has pretty soundly debunked the Loch Ness Monster, Loretto Staircase, and a number of odd things.
Yes, it indeed sounds so much like a rationalist that it also sounds like he's not defending the superstitions of Christianity at all!
I should have said "nobody relevant defends the superstitions of Christianity", i.e. there might be some, but no major public intellectual does it and gains any sort of traction. Ayaan Hirsi Ali was the most prominent defense in recent times which got a fair degree of traction, and not a single sentence in her defense was about the actual superstitions.
Jimmy Akin has defended the efficacy of prayer. He does defend the supernatural and paranatural.
I had never heard of Ayaan Hirsi Ali before her conversion, meanwhile Bishop Robert Barron's Word on Fire Institute has a global audience, streaming service, publishing company, etc. What qualifies someone to be a major public intellectual?
People from outside their religion regularly taking their arguments seriously would be a good start. Modern Christian apologetics don't seem to be having much headway with people who aren't already looking to be sold on Christianity.
Bishop Barron has been on the Ben Shapiro Show, delivered lectures for the Heritage Foundation, been interviewed by Lex Freidman, and many more. If you look in the comments on his Youtube channel it does seem like many atheists, protestants, and members of other faith traditions watch him regularly.
On a whim I decided to watch a bit of the Ben Shapiro interview, and I'm thoroughly unimpressed. When Ben asked him what his favorite argument is for the proof of God, he says what essentially boils down to the First Cause argument, something that's been trounced in the internet atheist debates for decades. When pressed with a follow up of what caused God then, he responded with special pleading. He dressed it up with fancy words like "that which is properly unconditioned on this reality", and his presentation is polished, but he's just regurgitating arguments from a debate that was largely settled over a decade ago. After watching a bit more and hearing nothing but a few "God of the Gaps" arguments I closed the tab.
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There is a major paradox in this philosophy, as it often takes a maximalist tabula rasa view. The world is supposed to be nothing more than mechanistic particles, yet the human psyche is untouched by it. Biological essentialist is used as a slur in the social sciences. Subjects such as human biodiversity, heritability of criminal behaviour or Iq or differences in evolutionary strategy between males and females are the ultimate taboo. A person can be born in the wrong body which means that the person isn't their body.
The view is that we are some free floating spirit that happened to be attached to a body. The phrase my friend who happens to be black is a perfect example of this reasoning. He was created black, he can't be anything else than black. There is no he without his black body. Yet we talk about it as if there is a he independent of his body that got inserted into the black body at birth.
Descartes philosophy is deeply flawed in that he both believed in mind body dualism and a mechanistic world. Either we are meat bots, aka mind = body or the world isn't mechanistic. Mind body dualism doesn't work in a mechanistic world. If there is no ghost or spirit there is no dualism.
How this giant contradiction in the middle of the modern world view doesn't explode goes beyond me.
I’m not seeing the paradox. Even for a radical blank-slatist, there exist things outside the human mind. Things like social and economic pressures. I have yet to see someone argue against the concept of malnutrition!
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There are millions of people who don't think human cognition is somehow beyond the realm of materialism or at least cause and effect.
There are. However, this view is difficult to combine with people being born into the wrong body or that the mind is separated from the body. If we are a meat-computer there is no dualism between the body and the mind.
The brain has an internal representation of the body — some tangle of neurons, presumably — that can be out of sync with the body's actual physical state. We see this pretty clearly with e.g. phantom limb syndrome.
There's no philosophical challenge for materialism here; both the brain's representation of the body and the body itself are entirely physical, as both a paper map and the territory it represents are entirely physical.
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Well, yes? The brain is an organ like any other.
Signed -A meat computer
Well I'm born into the "wrong" body since I'm not a 6'8" 269 IQ biologically immortal ubermensch, but to the extent that I'm vaguely sympathetic to trans people, it's because I recognize them as other people who are unhappy with the limitations of their current physical form and consider it laudable to adapt it to one's tastes, if possible.
As far as I'm concerned, unhappy with your body? Feel free to change it. Can't change it, (yet) like trans people and their biological sex? Nobody claimed that the universe is obliged to make it easy.
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And yet none of them can give a material explanation of it, which is, well, the whole problem.
You can't just look at drugs having an effect on experience and handwave away that the whole thing can be explained in material terms without actually providing a material explanation. And any explanation you need to provide has to answer a whole lot of thorny questions about what is conscious, how it becomes so, how it stops becoming so in a way that is tantamount to solving the largest part of metaphysics.
As far as I know the only coherent materialist answer is the one given by modernist totalitarianism, which is to say that individual consciousness is a delusion only experienced by the mentally ill. And that one is falsified not just by ones own experience of oneself but also by practice.
Fascinating. I would make the opposite inference. If the mind was separate from the body, like if we were little ghosts remote controlling the body, I would expect drugs and brain damage to have a much smaller effect or no effect at all. You can get some effect in the brain-as-antenna model, but stuff like prefrontal cortex lesions causing personality changes and primary visual cortex lesions causing loss of color vision in memories is hard to swallow.
None of this is conclusive but it makes me lean more towards materialism.
The antenna model is indeed a good way to approach the problem with the materialist understanding.
Did you know that radio transmitters can be damaged by operating them without an antenna?
At RF frequency voltages and currents are not well behaved and will do weird things that break Kirchhoff's laws. Power devices operating at those frequencies are often fragile and without the load of the antenna there's a risk that the output device creates much higher voltage magnification than the setup is rated for...and there goes your amp.
Now walking away from the metaphor, it is very much possible that even in a dualist understanding mind and matter are entangled enough that messing with their link creates big and specific problems. After all the radio transmitter and the antenna are properly different objects despite sharing this kind of link.
But my intuitions (in the total lack of evidence we are in of course) point towards a monist understanding as well. Just not a materialist one, but a realist one, as in an Aristotelician one. I think we probably are some combination of body and mind, but I have no reason to believe that this whole combination resides solely in materially observable reality given the fact that consciousness has never directly been observed or can be completely explained by materialism.
I trust we will get more answers (and more questions) once our understanding of neurology improves.
But in this case the brain would be the receiver antenna. I mean, this is all an hypothetical so you can always make up an excuse how a damage on one end (physical) would propagate to the other end (ghost world?), none of this could disprove it but also none of what we've discovered in neurology so far reinforces the existence of an immaterial mind.
Of course. That said if you take the Ghost-in-the-Machine view you can feel just as secure as pure materialists in that nothing that's been discovered so far reinforces the idea that mind is made of matter.
We really have no fucking idea how any of this shit works. We're barely further than antic medicine on this particular issue and it's almost purely down to the invention of MRI. Given most of the stuff people care about in this debate probably happens in the deeper regions of the brain we're even unlikely to get anywhere close to asking the right questions when Neuralink is tested on many humans.
But we are making some progress, so maybe someday we'll be able to have a meaningful debate about what consciousness is instead of hypothesizing about Motoko Kusanagi.
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Well, yes, you can.
If someone hands me a keyboard, I have no idea how the mechanics and electronics of the keyboard works, but I can demonstrate that the sounds produced correlate to the keys being pressed, and predict that there is some physical internal mechanism that produces this effect.
I don't get to say 'must be magic' just because I don't yet have a fully detailed physical model of the internal workings, that's not how Occam's Razor works.
You don't get to say must be magic indeed. The thing is I regard materialism as just as magical since it's not explaining anything.
Faced with something too complex to be understood, the correct answer is not to make up unfalsifiable theories based of one's moral tastes rather than evidence. And I denounce materialists because they pretend not to be doing than much harder than any mystic.
That is indeed not how Occam's razor works. And Occam's razor is a fallacious argument in any formal sense anyways.
Alright, this is the point in the conversation where you have to explain what you mean by 'explaining' for us to make any progress.
Because yeah, the ultimate riddle is always 'why is there something instead of nothing', and no observer within the universe can ever possibly give any explanation for that. All 'explanations' are just descriptions of how lower-level observable properties of the world lead to higher-level observable properties of the world, and there will always be a bottom level which defies further reduction into observable causes and can only be described as 'magic'.
But the magic layer for materialism is pushed orders of magnitude further down the causal chain than the magic layer for any other explanation, and materialism correctly explains far more things above its magic layer than any other framework.
That's pretty much what we mean when we say we 'have a good explanation' or 'a good model' of something, that the magic layer is pretty far down and we can use it to predict a lot of things above it.
I have deliberately avoided in this conversation referring to ultimate explanation of causes precisely because this is inaccessible.
A satisfactory theory of something has to be able to make falsifiable predictions about the phenomenon and provide precise causal insight into its mechanisms.
String theory is not yet a satisfactory theory of quantum gravity because it does not pass this bar. And yet it is internally a lot more precise than any of the speculations going around in neurology, let alone anything that relates to consciousness.
I am satisfied saying atoms (or rather what they represent as a model) are material because they can be manipulated predictably through experiment. Produce the same level of predictable manipulation and then we can talk about how much explanation you need. Because as it is you have nothing.
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Why makes you so sure that "we don't know" isn't an acceptable answer? Certainly beats making shit up, which is how I would frame the non-materialist position.
Drugs?
Brain damage?
Electrical stimulation?
If it can physically induce even minor changes to the brain, and that produces robustly consistent corollaries to conscious experience, it beats me what people are so intent on looking for.
Because Galileo was right, but his rivals could tell you where Saturn was tomorrow and he couldn't.
Well, good thing we sorted that small matter out eh? And that's withholding my disbelief that this claim is true.*
Materialism has explained ever greater fractions of reality, and everything else has been losing out. I know where my priors lie. It's the mark of a deeply broken mind to update when the evidence "forces" you to, as opposed to when you should.
*oh and it's not.
Your statement is completely wrong and a willfully revisionist reframing of history. Galileo was wrong about his claim that there were two moons on the opposite side of Saturn, but at no point did he manage to lose the entire planet, which would be an impressive feat, given that it's visible with the naked eye.
His geocentric rivals certainly didn't do a better job at predicting its motions, and where he outright won was to apply heliocentrism to the phases of Venus and the moons of Jupiter, where geocentrism failed miserably.
Evidently this historical example, which you were wrong about, was loadbearing on your beliefs about the applicability of materialism. Given that I went to the effort of correcting you, am I to assume you're a bona-fide materialist now? Didn't think so.
Edit: Oh, the irony of using empirical investigation into material causes to judiciate this.
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Truly, materialism is the worst metaphysical model, except for the rest of them.
When a system explains the world outside of my brain to a greater extent than I'd ever need to predict it and act upon it, and all the others can only shrug and say "well what about the mind?", I see no reason to assume that the truth is within one of the latter systems.
Is this how Elon Musk's defenders feel when he, despite being a successful unprecedented entrepreneur and engineer and all that, is mocked and belittled by redditors for posting cringe takes on Twitter?
I maintain skepticism is the only reasonable metaphysical position. We don't know how any of this works. Be humble.
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