notSpock wrote:
Among the ancient Greeks, the chief religious "authorities" were poets. The historical Homer is a bit shadowy and may have been a composite, but Hesiod was definitely a historical individual. I like the idea that religion is poetry. I've also heard that some Shiites regard literal interpretation of scripture as blasphemy -- if it is sacred, it is supposed to be figurative. But they rely on an authoritative human interpreter, which can also be very dangerous.
Prior to the advent of Christianity, none of the world's religions really had a hardened orthodoxy. The Christian church from very early times had a unique political dimension, aiming at social dominance. After the conversion of Roman Emperor Constantine, the church systematically used Roman political power to enforce orthodoxy in a heretofore unprecedented way, and to persecute pagans. Then this kind of thing started to spread around the world. A narrow Zoroastrian orthodoxy established itself in Persia; the Hindu renaissance kicked the Buddhists out of India; and so on. Gibbon in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire wrote that Attilla the Hun had a more tolerant policy on religion than the Christian Roman empire did.
But history develops unevenly. At the time of the Crusades, the Islamic and Jewish worlds were far more educated and sophisticated than Christian Europe. But as a result of contact, the Christian world became less insular, and the high middle ages were born. I'm no Thomist, but I think the compromise Aquinas worked out to make the teaching of Aristotle acceptable over the objections of hardliners was historically very progressive. And figures like Meister Eckhart show a far more interesting version of Christianity than we get from today's fundamentalists. But what really amazes me is that the Church set up universities all over Europe to teach Aristotle. Yes, they inserted very different definitions of God and the soul, to be compatible with orthodoxy. But this opened up a tremendous diversity of development that led directly to the modern world.
Then we come to paradoxes like the fact that the height of the European witch-burning insanity occurred not in medieval times, but during the sectarian religious wars of the early 17th century -- i.e., in early modern times.
In the 19th and early 20th century, it seemed like narrow-minded orthodoxy was on the retreat. But somehow it made a huge comeback in the later 20th century.
In the case of Islamic extremism in particular, we can largely thank the CIA for it. Up through World War II, that stuff was dying out in the Islamic world. But then during the Cold War, the CIA gave major backing to the most extreme religious reactionaries, because they were anti-Communist.
I don't have a good explanation for the seeming increase in fundamentalism in the U.S., except that the U.S. began in significant part as a refuge for religious fanatics. For example, the Puritans moved to New England because they thought the Church of England was too liberal. What maybe makes American fundamentalism so visible today is the way it has become politicized, which is a new development of the later 20th century. Maybe there really aren't that many more fundamentalists here than there already were; it's just that they have become aggressively political.
Very well said.
On the uptick of fundamentalism in the US I think it's a combination of two things:
1) The economic squeeze that the middle and working classes have had tightening on them since the 70's and what Mark Blyth described in his Global Trumpism lectures that when people are squeezed they tend to radicalize in one direction or the other.
2) We're in a 'Meaning Crisis', in the 'God is dead and we have killed him' sense but also in the context that our assessment of reality is now tightened down to socially and economic competition and the tighter that gets the less time or energy people have to introspect. It makes mercenaries and near-psychopaths of people. What sucks as well - if you take the time to get to know yourself right and figure out what you need in life and where you can best help - the train has already left the station and you're way behind everyone else who didn't get to know themselves but were constantly running toward and at competition every day (proverbial 'you') didn't which meant they not only kept accelerating but they're way out past you and continuously going faster. There's a professor and cognitive scientist at University of Toronto named John Vervaeke whose had interesting ideas - after studying world religions and a wide range of philosophy, formal psychology, etc.. to understand what it is that we're calling 'meaning', and the term he came up for it is 'relevance realization'. The drive toward relevance seems to be in line with natural selection in that those who have it calibrated in favor of what works and throw over their shoulder what only pays in the long run - they're fast, their dumb, they're sometimes lucky - and when they're lucky they win big and it's visible, when they lose big they tend to just go into hiding from the world.
Right now our incentive landscape is really crappy. It's neoliberalism as a view of the cosmos - it might be the fastest democratic system (in a world of countries in zero-sum race for power) but it's crap for mental health. It's every previously non-monetized thing getting monetized and a social world where people just about put living diaries on places like Facebook, Twitter, etc.. It's increasingly socially isolated people doing economically worse and the FUD is getting cranked to 11, not just perhaps that we do have some long-termist extinction risks but the monetization of attention seeing that we pay attention and 'stay on' whatever gives us those feelings. If all that's not enough no worries - we've got 80%+ unemployment as we automate everything, and we have no clue where we'll be if AI gets smarter than us. Strange times to be alive.
What I'd be interested to see is whether religion is on the rise in Europe, a place that has been more secular for longer. If so it would suggest that the change is largely economic suffering and uncertainty.
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The loneliest part of life: it's not just that no one is on your cloud, few can even see your cloud.
29 Jun 2023, 11:44 pm
