Pragmatists Guide to Crafting Religion Review - Chapter 1 Digressions
Previously:
Preamble
Chapter 1 - The Why
Preamble to Digression
In my Preamble Post I stated PGtCR was “very interesting in its own right, introducing a lot of striking ideas and concepts.” This is true, and those striking ideas and concepts are sprinkled haphazardly throughout the book without rhyme or reason.
To demonstrate what I mean by this, consider my review of Chapter 1. This chapter had the theme of “Why This Book Was Written” and goes Culture Is Entwined With Biology → Modern Cultures Are Dying Out Due To Fertility Collapse → Cultures That Survive Will Vary Significantly From The Modern Culture → We Should Be Deliberate And Craft The Cultures We Want In The Future.
This theme was not explicit. I had to haul themes and connections out of the word mines and smelt them in one of those giant furnace pots to distill that theme out. I jumped around in the chapter a bit, the quotes I present in my review are not fully in the same order they appear in the chapter. They’re roughly in that order, but some jiggery and pokery was involved. And along the way I had to refine out a lot of random tangents and digressions that were very interesting, but that literally pulled the reader away from the central theme and made it harder to discern.
In the end my review was just barely over 3,000 words, but took over ten hours to write. This doesn’t include the initial reading time from several months ago.
Now, I’m not complaining1, the other ideas presented are quite thought provoking, which is why I cover them below. But a book like this would strongly benefit from enough discipline and structure to draw the reader through a compelling narrative in each chapter. These sorts of things work better when the action within a chapter moves with the theme to build a unified picture.
But who knows, I read the whole thing anyway, so maybe that’s not necessary? OTOH, I wasn’t convinced by the book at the end, and maybe I would have been otherwise? Anyway, here are some summaries/highlights from the scattered other musings in Chapter 1.
An “Eccentric overeducated hypercompetent contrarian … who takes morality very seriously.”
The Collinses spend a lot of time talking about Calvinism, and actually about lots of things that don’t seem very useful for the purposes of actually going about crafting a religion. This annoyed me at first, but once I adjusted my expectations from “This is a How-To Book” to “This is a General Interest Book on a Swath of Religion-Adjacent Topics” it became delightful. Lots of interesting tangents on all sorts of things. Likely every chapter review of mine will have an accompanying “here’s other stuff in this chapter” section, of which this is the first. Starting with Calvinism!
Calvinist culture shaped almost every aspect of the modern United States (and, to an extent, the current world order). Calvinists made up two-thirds of Declaration of Independence signers […] around a third of prominent abolitionists, and are often credited with the invention of capitalism. Yet today, Calvinists make up less than 0.5% of the U.S. population, and most of those individuals are only theologically Calvinist rather than culturally so. Calvinist culture went from crafting an entire world order, making up between 55% and 75% of Americans around the time of the revolution, to virtual extinction in a single century without anyone noticing.
That’s 2.5 centuries by my count, but nonetheless2, that level of decline is shocking.
Calvinism as presented in this book as very much optimized to be The Anti-Dark-Arts Religion. There are few things its adherents hate more than manipulating someone else’s views on reality, even in ways that the speaker thinks are truthful! Seeing how much I hate being lied to, this made me feel deep affection for them immediately. It seems like a religion optimized for autistic-leaning folks. If so, this explains a lot about their massive successes early on! And also explains how they were swept aside by normie religions. :(
An example of just how anti-dark-arts they are:
…in the children’s book, The Witch of Blackbird Pond[…] acting out passages of the Bible was framed as sinful because it might cause another person to interpret the Bible the way they did instead of through independent reasoning. By priming a person to see the world in a certain way, one risks robbing them of an element of personal agency.
no matter how well intentioned a person may be, they risk corrupting the truth with their own perspective and biases if they attempt to guide you to it. This is why at some traditional Calvinist churches, churchgoers would sit and read their own Bibles rather than listen to a sermon-delivering priest
That’s pretty hard-core! Taken just slightly further we’d get Terra Ignota’s laws against discussing religion at all. (Hm…)
In some modern Calvinist churches, this means that when a church does have a preacher, they must read the Bible in order (rather than skipping around) because picking and choosing passages could incept the listener with the preacher’s biases.
Oh dear. No wonder the religion fell apart. Still, at The Bayesian Conspiracy we independently rediscovered this principle by going through every sequence post in order. Seemed fun at the time.
Calvinist groups appeared less like a religious cohort and more like a really intense book club for those obsessed with living the most technically correct life possible and exploring the truth behind our metaphysical reality.
The Calvinist tendency to manifest more as a worldview than a community contributed to the culture’s downfall.
I’m in this picture and I don’t like it.
But dang, assuming all this is accurate, I’m kinda in love with the Calvinists right now!
Why So Much Monogamy?
above certain population thresholds, monogamous cultures outcompete their polygynous counterparts, likely because monogamy produces measurably lower rates of cheating, rape, murder, terrorism, corruption, and other anti-social behaviors instigated by high rates of unattached males—an inevitable byproduct of polygynous cultures.
While 83% of individual human cultures are polygynous, nearly all of today’s most dominant cultures are monogamous, thanks to the historic competitive edge granted by this practice.
This is very concerning for my peoples. I am extremely against rape, terrorism, corruption, etc, and willing to pay some large costs to avoid those. But a world of hard monogamy is literally one that’s not worth living in for me and others like me. There is no culture worth creating that doesn’t welcome polyamory alongside our monogamous kin. In fact, ours should develop robust cultural norms & support regarding poly best practices. But eschewing monogamy gets you terrorism and corruption?? This section of Chapter 1 threw me into a bit of an existential crisis when I read it.
Fortunately, in the intervening months, I’ve spent a lot of time talking to a handful of people who have rejected default culture. I now think that the idea that unattached males wreak havoc on society is just sexism. I used to believe this because it’s what I was taught. Unlearning things ingrained is very hard, and I don’t blame the Collinses for being infected the same way I was. I still have an instinctive dislike of men that I’m very slowly expunging.
Furthermore, they’re talking about polygynous cultures, which are dramatically different from polyamorous ones. Not only are these radically different cultures, they’re more different from each other than either one is different to monogamy! I can maybe understand the confusion among normies, but I really think the Collinses should know this, seeing as they’re no strangers to the Rationalist movement.
I suspect they using this argument as a soldier against polyamory not because this is an actual concern, but because it could scare away some people from polyamory (it certainly frightened me at first!), and polyamorous relationships have lower fertility rates than monogamous relationships. Which is the Collinses primary concern. This is a minor sin, and if it’s true they should feel a bit bad.
(Wes Fenza also points out that polyamory is strongly correlated with liberalism, and low-fertility hits liberal cultures significantly harder that conservative ones, which is likely the actual driver here.)
Regardless, young males are particularly high-variance in every society, and have the most potential for destructive action. They are the demographic that needs the most societal investment per-capita. One of the most pressing concerns for any new culture is How Do We Guide Young Men To Good Outcomes. Ours must not forget this. So this interjections was very helpful in highlighting this and putting it near the top of my “New Religion Notes” google doc.
Who’s Paying For This City?
in New York City, just the wealthiest 38,700 residents, 0.5% of the city’s population, pay 42.5% of taxes.
Ironically, progressive tax policy, which has led to the elite paying most of the taxes, has turned cities into business units that need to primarily serve the needs of the ultra-elite, or risk losing their primary funding sources and going bankrupt as a result. In a post-COVID world, where remote work is a possibility, the value proposition of cities to the ultra-elite is quickly eroding.
An interesting fact re taxes. It seems wrong that 42.5% would be more important than 57.5% though. I suspect cities have a lot of interests they balance. While it’s certainly important for them to keep the highest tax payers happy, this isn’t actually a bad thing because those tax payers bring outsized value to a city. And it’s balanced by the individually-less-weighty but very-considerable-when-massed interests of the masses. Yeah, I bet they fuck up a lot. But I doubt there’s an exodus coming.
The more interesting dynamic is one I heard put recently as there’s only two types of people who live in New York, and similar high-cost cities like San Francisco and Seattle. The first type is people in high-paying careers, who live in the city because it enables those careers. They cannot rest, and if they are between jobs they must quickly get another one. They only live there to work, they don’t raise kids there, and once they are done with this part of their career (or retiring) they move elsewhere. These cities are temporary locations for employment purposes, not homes, not communities. Anyone doing other things in their life that are interesting but not lucrative (arts, community, etc) are forced out, and the city becomes monofocused and spiritually poor.
The second type is the state-supported underclass, that exists in bad conditions largely via government subsidies and aid. Each year there are ever fewer in between those two poles.
No Seriously, Your Biology Is Altered By Culture
It fascinates us how quickly people cast out aspects of their traditional cultures without understanding why those elements evolved. Many throw out the “hard stuff” in their cultures, such as fasting and arbitrary self-denial, without understanding those cultural practices evolved both for general health reasons and to strengthen the individual’s inhibitory pathways in their prefrontal cortex. Consider that strengthened inhibitory pathways likely offer some protection against intrusive thoughts and, as a result, lower rates of anxiety and depression
(Emphasis added)
Big if true! This ties directly into Secret Of Our Success claims about the power of cultures to evolve practices that are illegible but vital, with manioc root preparation as the most striking example. But this can be argued about every single traditional practice, and if we do that we might as well just adopt an ancient traditional culture wholesale. Kinda defeats the entire purpose of this project, plus no one wants to live in a world of ancient traditional cultures.
The really infuriating thing is that individual claims like “arbitrary self-denial strengthens the inhibitory pathways” are difficult to prove with enough confidence to incorporate them. But if this is true it would be really good to know. A self-denial ritual would be an automatic shoe-in for “vital practice we should all adopt” and we could give a rational reason as to why. For a Rationalist Religion, having rational reasons for stuff is actually super important!
The Collinses have a solution to this which will be explored more later. The short version is: try everything, keep what works. Which means trying dozens of different micro-religions under a broader umbrella, and seeing which ones are the most successful over several generations. If all the successes incorporate self-denial, it’ll be pretty darn clear that is indeed pretty important.
That time scale is a bit too long for my purposes, but I admit sometimes reality is just very uncooperative. We’ll have to make a best attempt with uncertain information.
One thing of legitimate important to consider—the aesthetics of a fast, or other self-denial, are badass. A culture that values aesthetics as a religious virtue should have some sort of self-denial ritual for that reason alone.
In the playful extreme, a religious mandate that everyone hold sacred NoFap November would be hilarious. :)
They Dance How They Want To Dance
The Addams Family presents a great fictional example of a cultivar with an ambiguous religious underpinning. Unlike their derivatives, such as the Munsters, the Addams Family is not primarily monstrous because they are literally monsters but because they have a unique family culture
This is a fascinating insight! This is true of the in-universe world of the Addams Family, and we as viewers accepted it without thinking about it. Inability to fit into society is akin to monsterism. :mind-blown:
But importantly — the Addams Family are the protagonists, and the viewer sides with them! We all feel like outsider sometimes. Often monstrously so. To see a group of outsiders who are nonetheless actually really good people, who can exist alongside an alien society, and who love and support each other, is a story the American populace loves. This says good things about our willingness to tolerate alien cultures as long as they aren’t actively anti-social, and our desire to be tolerated in return. I love this gem of insight, it has enriched my life to read it.
OK, I’m complaining a little bit
I say “nonetheless” but for real… does it worry anyone else that 1776 to 2023 is portrayed as “a single century”?
Couple of comments:
1. Monogamy is likely adaptive to farmer economics, which is why and how it spread, and is less useful to industrial economics, hence why its power has waned over the last 200 years. It's hard to say what will be adaptive in a world of AI economics.
2. Many Protestant Christians practice in denominations that originated with Calvinist beliefs, but unfortunately much of that has been lost. My own light experience with Presbyterianism is that some of the cultural Calvinism remains there (thanks, I suspect, to Presbyterianism's governing structure), even if the explicit Calvinist beliefs have mostly been lost.
I think it's something of an inconsistency to be both into Calvinism and polyamory. There are branches of spirituality much more sympatico with polyamory, such as anything tantra, which notably also eschews self-denial.
Spirituality is ultimately about having a principle that is more powerful than the self guiding you, so it's important not to get lost in the exoteric aspects of religion when trying to dream up a new one.