Pragmatists Guide to Crafting Religion Review - Chapter 3A - The Hardness Spectrum

Previously:
Preamble
Chapter 1 - The Why
Chapter 1 digressions
Chapter 2 - Numbers Go Up

[audio available here, courtesy of AskWho[

Chapter 3 - TYPES OF CULTURES

We’re going to discuss some more fundamentals before getting into how to do the work of crafting a religion. This chapter his long and has two distinct halves with two different focuses, so I’m doing it in two parts. Part 1 is on the Cultural Hardness Scale, ranging from Hard Culture to Did You Hear Something? I Coulda Sworn I Heard Something Culture-y

It’s Hard to be Cultured

Hard cultures appear to be called this because staying within one is relatively hard. They demand a lot.

-They often encourage adherents to wear unique outfits or perform rituals that cause them to feel like outsiders
-They attempt to prevent adherents from associating with other cultures
-They almost always provide copious social safety nets for members
-They incentivize members to proselytize

This is to prevent bleed (the term for members drifting away and disengaging from the culture, the 3rd factor of culture-number health from Chapter 2).¹ This works by making their members so cringe to outsiders that outsiders won’t associate with them. I can’t deny that the Jehovah’s Witnesses certainly do this. I left anyway, partly by coming to internalizing that no one wants me around to such a degree that I didn’t differentiate between Witnesses and everyone else.

And partly because I found a bunch of other weirdos that did accept and associate with me, via The Internet. Having a social network outside of the church meant that all that work the church put in to make me too cringe to walk away didn’t work. The Collinses also cite this as a major factor:

We suspect the ubiquity of the internet and social networks plays a critical role, as Amish and Mennonite groups are among the only cultivars to demonstrate resistance to the collapse (while Mennonites often use phones with internet access, they frequently lock out most of their apps behind passwords to which only friends or spouses have access

However their claims here lose some cohesion (or else I just can’t understand them), because they start talking about birth rates again rather than bleed rates.

Hard cultures, which for the past hundred years or so were the obvious candidates to inherit human civilization, are now in a death spiral.

the Mormon population in Utah has almost fallen below replacement rate (2.1)

Why are we so certain it is their control over internet access that is protecting them and keeping their birth rate high? […] It’s Pennsylvania Dutch and lack of a phone that seems to be the really strong indicator of Amish-type fertility.

There isn’t a causal mechanism for how phones/internet impact fertility (rather than bleed rates) presented in this chapter, all I can see is gesturing at the correlation between internet use and fertility, which are both corelated with many other things as well.

Getting Lazy

most soft cultures started as hard cultures and shifted over time, asking less and less of adherents … Because they also ask progressively less from adherents in terms of time commitment and financial support, their ability to offer meaningful social services and safety nets erodes with each passing decade …

This sounds bad, but apparently people really like it!

Soft cultures are often the most “pleasant” to grow up within […] soft cultures are often the most dominant cultural subsets, population wise, in any given region. […] they also refortify their ranks by bleeding from adjacent hard cultures

I hate to say this, but so far I don’t see what hard cultures have going for them. They try to isolate you, they are unpleasant, their safety nets are apparently unneeded, and their fertility rates are also below replacement rates!

While I agree that modern culture is soft (or super-soft, see below), I think the failure of modern culture isn’t its softness, it’s its failure to adapt to a post-supernatural reality. The Collinses also acknowledge this…

when people still believe in God but believe in him “casually” (as measured by frequency of church attendance), they become extremely susceptible to predatory memetic sets (conspiracy theories and the like)

…but don’t engage with it because atheists have even lower birth rates than “casual” believers.

“Pop Culture Paganism”

Super-soft culture is exemplified by:
-Generic spiritualism with a pantheon of gods
-A heavy focus on self-categorization (things like horoscopes and blood type tests) --Rituals designed to lead to good luck
-Ceremonies tied to forgetting an adherent’s identity while dancing
-Attributing agency to inanimate objects or animals
-Attributing power to intention
-Attributing power to fetishes (things like crystals)

Regarding the first (pantheon of gods), this comes from a modern believer —

"The way I see it, pop culture figures are essentially thoughtforms on the astral plane. The more energy we in the mundane world pour into them, the bigger and stronger they get in the astral. … The entities that I call deities are generally very, very old and very, very strong”

All the others I’ve seen personally, and I assume most readers have too. The Collinses say that these are all things found in the earliest religions, and which continue to show up again and again in folk beliefs/religions. They go so far as to call it the “default” human belief structure, tied to our biology or deep psychological foundations, and imply that all more complicated religions are built out from or suppressing these things.

Just as water receding from a lake begins to reveal the topography underneath, bit by bit, starting with the peaks, evolutionarily derived religious and cultural traditions begin to incorporate parts of this “default” culture, bit by bit, as they soften.

They use this as a warning for religion-crafters:

That all successful cultivars come from traditions that are heavily derived from this biological default should give pause to any wishing to argue the default is well optimized for intergenerational durability in any competitive, technologically advanced environment. (There would not have been pressures allowing deviations to outcompete it if that were the case.)

OK sure. But actually this seems like incredibly useful information. This is what humans revert to when we’re not under pressure to distort ourselves into harsh shapes for survival? I think this means that this is what we should be aiming for! The closer we can get to this ideal, the happier people will be, and the more inclined they will be to simply do these things because the come naturally. An entire chapter at least should be dedicated to exploring this as it’s what all religions will have to be built on/over and need to work with/around. Preferably an entire book or series of blog posts.

The Collinses don’t spent any more time on it, because that’s not the project they are here for, I guess. They care far less about what draws humans and far more about how to get them to have many descendants. That’s fine, it’s their book, for their project, not mine. I wish we had more aligned interests. However even finding just this piece was really valuable. It makes a great starting point, and it was worth reading this chapter (and perhaps this whole book?) for this alone.

The previous paragraph is a thing I say many times in the course of reading the book. 😅 Lots of useful little things, but I wish it was a different book. C’est la vie.

Make It Even Softer

Going softer than pop-culture paganism we get just straight up pop-culture. At this point I don’t think we’re talking about anything religion-like, but the Collinses are on a roll and we’re gonna keep going down the cultural softness scale.

pop cultures are designed to sell themselves … are largely parasitic … [they promise] an easier life, sex, power, acceptance, prestige, wealth, or some other factor. Like heroin, pop cultures deliver on their promises at much lower rates

I mean, yeah, it’s not really a religion they’re here, or even a full culture. It’s just a scene. If you try to make a life out of a scene, I think you’re probably gonna have a bad time. Though I guess that’s exactly their point.

Pop cultures often promote the concept of safety nets but rarely provide them themselves. Instead, they typically try to force external organizations (like local governments) to create them

And like most things governments provide as basic backstops, they mostly suck.

These cultures actively promote an external locus of control, sometimes going so far as to work in features that shift people's loci of control from internal to external, typically by presenting a compelling narrative explaining how purely external forces have driven things and people to be as they are. In extreme cases, pop cultures will go so far as to punish members who promote an internal locus of control (e.g., they may shame an individual for even daring to suggest a person might be responsible for their own failures).

Internal Locus of Control comes up a lot in this book. I agree that this is very important to life outcomes, and anyone or anything that promotes External Locus of Control is destructive both to society and to the individual.

Adding Internal Locus of Control to the checklist, that’s an important one. Glad to have it pointed out again.

they make adherents uniquely susceptible to any vice exacerbated by a lack of self-discipline and isolation from social support structures. As such, pop culture adherents suffer from much higher rates of mental health issues

I’m going to interject here to say that the heroin analogy is probably apt, because pop cultures sound like what you take when you have nothing else. Apparently almost all the animals in cages stop massive self-administration of heroin when they’re given lots of fulfilling things to do (and, in the case of social animals, a vibrant society to interact with). I’ve met humans who’ve said the same thing — once I had something worth living for, stopping heroin use was actually pretty easy. It was the lack of anything meaningful in life that made heroin such an attractive alternative.

Which is to say, the best way to save people from the above-described “pop culture” is to create a culture/religion that fulfills those needs.

Teen Edition

Evanescent youth cultures are iterations of pop cultures that target teens

After the Pop Culture section there’s an Evanescent Youth Cultures section. I don’t think it needed to be split out, because it’s just a subset of pop cultures. The Collinses obviously thought it merited special attention, probably because teens are particularly vulnerable to cultural capture.

While this is true, I think it’s entirely downstream of the fact that we have long stripped our young adults of most of their rights and continue to force them to waste their lives in part-time prisons. You, too, would be very vulnerable to a culture promising you almost any change from a hellish existence as a subhuman. This problem will not and cannot be solved by attacking Evanescent Youth Cultures. It can only be solved by attacking the dominant culture that we live in which subjects us to this. Evanescent Youth Cultures will barely be a blip once young adults have some reason to live.

Examples of Evanescent Youth Cultures: Goths

How dare! Goths are awesome.

Evanescent youth cultures rarely persist into adulthood but can be dangerous to other cultures as they can culturally reset adherents, erasing their birth cultures and priming them to join any group local to them

My year-old note on this says “sounds like bullshit.” :) My actually thought-out charitable reply is “It’s not the youth culture that’s to blame. Its the betrayal visited upon from the birth culture by being stuck in a prison for many prime-life years.”

Hard vs Soft: Self-denial

Remember in Chapter 1 where it was said that culture and humans co-evolved, with culture putting literally evolutionary pressure on human biology, while humans also evolve their cultures to better suit their environment? Here’s they give an example of how this plays out with one particular cultural practice in Hard cultures vs Soft cultures.

Almost all hard cultures have some ritual focused on voluntary self-denial, such as Ramadan, Lent […] pop cultures …reward people for succumbing to their base desires, as is seen in pop culture outputs like the Intuitive Eating Movement, which entails telling people they are being healthy by eating whatever they want whenever they want

Almost all processes in our brains require “exercise” to work at optimal efficiency …the “inhibitory pathway”…is in the prefrontal cortex and is used to shut down thoughts in other parts of our brain. …You are using your inhibitory pathway when you decide not to reach for that third donut or lash out at a friend in anger

Pop cultures are toxic because there’s a big difference between what you might want to do in the moment (which is what pop cultures cater to) and what you need to do (which is often unpleasant)

They brought up this same idea in Chapter 1. The addition of “and here’s why soft cultures are bad” by giving a direct example was the new part. I’m not sure if that’s enough to justify printing it again, but it’s late and I already typed this part up, so it stays in. This makes a good story, and my personal prejudices incline me to believe it. They do specify, however, that this is their own conjecture. I still think it’s a good idea, and aesthetically pleasing.

The Goal

Stable cultures […] are more flexible than hard cultures in terms of supported beliefs and lifestyles while still imparting benefits and practices to adherents that make them stronger

Attrition is low among stable cultures, not typically because they threaten potential detractors but because they clearly communicate their benefits to adherents […] This aspect of stable cultures means one doesn’t have to maintain a strict metaphysical worldview in order to remain a dedicated adherent.

There is surprisingly little word-count given to Stable Cultures, given that this is our goal. I suppose there’s a lot of value in saying “here’s all the things that can go wrong that you definitely want to avoid.” And this is just one chapter, so it would totally make sense to have a chapter listing all the failure modes, then ending that chapter with “And here’s the Good Ending we’re striving for! Now lets proceed into the next chapter where we examine that good ending!” That is the reason I’m stopping this chapter review here, in fact. It’s the natural progression.

But for what it’s worth, this isn’t where the chapter ends IRL. This is followed by a digression on cultural niches, and then one new, final bad-culture is introduce and examined in such detail that it deserves its own chapter (and also it’s own separate review, which will come in a couple weeks).

Back to stable cultures though:

a stable culture that does not engender some discrimination against its adherents is far more likely to become soft and eventually go extinct. For this reason, stable cultures are more stable when they feature traditions to do just enough to “other” members and subject them to some discrimination. While discrimination makes the outside world a more hostile place to stable cultures’ adherents, it imparts a unique sense of cultural pride, providing these cultures with added strength

As a Rationalist-inspired religion, I don’t think we’ll ever have to worry about this. The normies already view us as insanely cringe, and that’ll never change. This is a good thing, it’s the equivalent of Firing Gunshots To Keep Rent Down. Huzzah!

When someone ridicules you for being “weird” or “cringe,” they are acting as tools of their culture’s immune system, attempting to prevent you from taking actions outside the bounds of cultural norms.
Protective cultural mechanisms can’t be arbitrarily removed among cultures that exist in broader ecosystems without severe consequences.

I know that some people look disapprovingly at calling others “Normies.” But, frankly, I’m going to adopt the Collinses view here that it’s good, actually. Calling someone a normie is the rat-equivalent of one of them calling us cringe. It reinforces where the boundaries between our two cultures are. That’s a good thing as long as you believe that having a diversity of cultures is good, and I certainly do! Humans are diverse and different enough to need multiple cultures to serve them all.

But before we get to that, we are going to talk at length about a culture they find very corrosive, enough to dedicate significant parts of this book to in multiple places. The rest of this chapter is the first of those, coming up next (almost) in this series.

1. Also “hard cultures promote an internal locus of control, encouraging adherents to take personal responsibility for their failings in life” but this isn’t for bleed purposes, it’s just a thing.