Tag: religion

All Hail Evolved Irrationality

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From an impersonal distance, watching other people make decisions is always interesting. They may apply reason and passion in varied measures to figure out a way forward, or a lifestyle, or even fashion choices. Often they mindfully weigh the choices and decide to moderate even that process, committing to a radical path that has drama and uncertainty. It’s sometimes better to be interesting than cautious and correct. As a virtue this recalls the romantic movements that arose in opposition to the mechanization of the 19th century as trains and steamships criss-crossed the world. Order and peace were at odds with drama, passion, faith, and love that are somehow in our core, animalistic nature.

Motifs of uncertainty crept into science and reason as we transitioned into the 20th century, from the stochastic rumble of thermodynamics, to the realigning of basic concepts like gravity as a space-time curvature, and then the wave-particle duality of quantum reality. The clockwork of the universe that was so oppressively mechanistic showed fuzzy edges and knotty intersections that defied ordinary-scale expectations. The combined mathematical realizations of incompleteness and algorithmic uncomputability overlaid the investigations of the physical to such an extent that new theories were developed that proposed that the quantum world and mind are inextricably laced together; subjective and objective do not exist independently.

Even as our knowledge and management of the universe has grown, there is a background roil of irrationality, like the primal chaos of Tiamat. Human thought has a collection of ways of organizing the world that appear to be natural consequences of our social development. Religious belief is a widespread catalyst for building predictable and supportive communities by slaving our baser tendencies to coordinating strictures, obligations, and status maintenance.… Read the rest

Intellectual Capital, Religion, Audiofools, and Irrational Poynting Vectors

Mark Davis2 Comments

Twin New York-associated articles of note today. First, we have the New York Times with Ilana Horwitz of Tulane University on the topic of how religion helps working-class young people—especially boys—to better achieve after high school. This is part of the ongoing saga of better understanding the sagging social support network (“social capital”) that has been suggested to explain high rates of despair, opioid addiction, alcohol abuse, suicide, and even white supremacist ideation and Trumpism among working-class Americans. What is particularly interesting to me is that the same religious enhancement of educational attainment doesn’t apply to the children of college-educated professionals and the author notes that strong religious belief systems—especially among young women—may interfere with future decision-making by directing them towards traditional female careers and roles.

Meanwhile, Cornel West has a wide-ranging interview in The New Yorker where he repeatedly decries Harvard for becoming a spiritual wasteland of sorts, dedicated to the education of a professional-managerial class that lacks some elemental soul needed to translate ideas into public intellectual and social engagement:

That’s not just brother Trump, even though he’s a neo-Fascist one. He’s on the continuum with so much of the professional-managerial class in terms of their lack of accountability to working people and poor people. Once you have that kind of spiritual decay and moral decrepitude, man, then it’s just gangsterization on steroids, man. That’s where America’s headed.

So it seems many of the religious working-class college achievers are just working towards some kind of soulless professionalism. Without converting their intellectual achievements into activism, and by just focusing on jobs and further achievement, they are content to let the backslide towards authoritarianism continue apace. West sees a neoliberal hypocrisy at every turn, as well, and almost as toxic as the fascist urge.… Read the rest

Science, Pre-science, and Religion

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Francis Fukuyama in The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution draws a bright line from reciprocal altruism to abstract reasoning, and then through to religious belief:

Game theory…suggests that individuals who interact with one another repeatedly tend to gravitate toward cooperation with those who have shown themselves to be honest and reliable, and shun those who have behaved opportunistically. But to do this effectively, they have to be able to remember each other’s past behavior and to anticipate likely future behavior based on an interpretation of other people’s motives.

Then, language allows transmission of historical patterns (largely gossip in tight-knit social groups) and abstractions about ethical behaviors until, ultimately:

The ability to create mental models and to attribute causality to invisible abstractions is in turn the basis for the emergence of religion.

But this can’t be the end of the line. Insofar as abstract beliefs can attribute repetitive weather patterns to Olympian gods, or consolidate moral reasoning to a monotheistic being, the same mechanisms of abstraction must be the basis for scientific reasoning as well. Either that or the cognitive capacities for linguistic abstraction and game theory are not cross-applicable to scientific thinking, which seems unlikely.

So the irony of assertions that science is just another religion is that they certainly share a similar initial cognitive evolution, while nevertheless diverging in their dependence on faith and supernatural expectations, on the one hand, and channeling the predictive models along empirical contours on the other.… Read the rest

Transcendent Ivory

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Alain de Botton has an interesting suggestion in the Wall Street Journal: create restaurants that are communal and that are designed to foster social interaction with an almost religious quality. This follows fairly closely on the heels of Hubert Dreyfus of Berkeley’s suggestion that maybe a good religious substitute can be found in mass sports events.

Why is a secular substitute for religion needed? It’s not completely clear. Each author argues that there is something fundamentally missing from our modern, cosmopolitan lives. What is missing is a sense of wonder, a sense of transcendence, a sense of community involvement, a sense of egoless participation, a universe of interactions based on something other than commercial interests, non-creepy greetings (de Botton)…something.

But they both neglect one of the crowning achievements of the modern world. Organized sports are largely passive events for the spectators. Restaurants are far too much about eating and not about ideas. What we do have, however, are university systems that are dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge and are accessible (with all the caveats of price) to almost all of the population. Only in university systems are people organized around a commitment to knowledge, science, and art. Economic status is less important than intellectual capacity. Ideas reign and social interaction is driven by common cause.

What we need is more ivory towers. After all, even the phrase may have been sourced from the Song of Solomon:

Thy neck is as a tower of ivory; thine eyes like the fishpools in Heshbon, by the gate of Bathrabbim: thy nose is as the tower of Lebanon which looketh toward Damascus

… Read the rest