[audio available here, courtesy of AskWho] I’m increasingly convinced of several things: Humans need deep community. You may think this is common sense, but it’s not a thing I knew. This was always implicit knowledge, embedded in the experience of life itself. When community disappeared, so did the knowledge that it was necessary for those who’d never experienced it. And everyone who had experienced community already had this implicit knowledge without ever having been taught it explicitly, so they assumed it was just the natural state to know this thing. It is not
Re. "Most humans need a religion": I'll say again, most people who have lived on Earth didn't have anything like a Western religion. They had beliefs about gods and spirits, but they didn't get their morals or their purpose for living from them. This 20th-century Western malaise and nihilism is the result of the collapse of a totalitarian religion, Christianity, which everyone in the West, whether Christian or not, was indoctrinated with from birth. Christianity forbids any purpose in life but that of serving God, and any moral reasoning other than blind obedience. So Christians, and people embedded in a Christian culture, never develop a purpose of their own or the capacity for moral reasoning. People suddenly deprived of the cultural swaddling of Christianity can't stand on their own because they never learned to walk, never developed the muscles.
This may be the case, but if so, you can't just take away the swaddling and expect people to walk. It takes a lot of work to develop muscles. For someone who's never done that and without any culture that teaches you how to do that, what else are you going to do but find another swaddle/crutch? You still need to move! A religion that takes the place of that and helps people to slowly build those muscles seems like a valuable thing, even if it's only around for a generation or two to transition into self-sufficiency culture
If you mean most humans in America today need a religion, then I agree. Historically, people who said "people need religion" meant "all people always have and always will need religion". Many of them accepted self-deception as a necessary permanent state, or dreamed up elitist totalitarian states in which a few enlightened people control the masses using something like religion. Like--sorry, I'm going to say it again--Plato. But also Rousseau (maybe not consciously), Hitler (very consciously), Mao (to whatever extent he actually cared about the state), and today's North Korean state. I don't want an exclusive focus on today's problem to make tomorrow's problem.
I also want to teach a new religion. I would call it Infinitism, since the Infinite is the thing that is present in every spiritual tradition, including atheistic Buddhism, and it would claim that it is not new: every world religion is a different school of Infinitism. I would also fold science into it, since science is an infinite endeavor: every scientific truth is always open to falsification, and I once read a scientist say that the proper scientific posture is to always be open to whatever experience can dish out, instead of trying to impose limitations on it, and the Infinite is that which admits no limitation.
Most people need a religion? This seems inconsistent with the fact that the least religious countries in Europe seem to be doing fine. Are the people in these countries latching onto some other thing you'd call a religion?
It also seems a stretch to call wokism a religion. It lacks several characteristics of typical religions, like a cosmogony, supernatural entities, an account of the afterlife.
I don't know any details of life in Europe, so I can't comment.
The magical parts of religion aren't the vital parts of it. I fear they might be necessary?? :( In order to have costly signals and buy-in. But the parts of religion that actually do the work in the world obviously aren't magic-based because they literally can't be. As Trace says, the core of a religion is the ideology that serves as ones epistemic and moral engine for navigating the world. And that's fully wokeism
If the “necessary” part of religion is the ideology, then it seems more appropriate to say that people need ideology rather than that people need religion. But then I think that would be more false.
In the literature on the psychology of religion, religious people reliably report higher life satisfaction than non-religious people. But I think the consensus view is that this is because of the social support, not the ideology part of being religious.
And there also seem to be secular/non-ideological ways for people to bond together. Eg military involvement, gang involvement, sports, shared hobbies.
Hitler consciously changed Nazism into a religion, and it also lacked all those things. That's not a coincidence; Wokeism is descended from Nazism. It has the same metaphysics: Binary thought, phenomenological epistemology which delegitimizes science and fact, social constructivism to the point of believing consensus defines truth and that scientific truths are different for different races, racial essentialism and authenticity, racial purity, social unity, conflict theory, ethics based on absolute rules given a rank-ordering, and Hegelian progressivism (a kind of "manifest destiny"). You can trace its philosophical foundations back through French existentialists and post-modernists to the Nazis and their precursors: Heidegger, Spengler, Hegel, Fichte, and others. (Marx is a big influence, but I think not so much on its metaphysics, because Marx didn't think carefully about metaphysics.)
A key thing to realize about the closely-related Hegelian, Marxist, Nazi, and Woke religions is that they invest the group, not the individual, with free will, rights, and a soul. Their Heaven is for the culture, not for individuals, who are helpless and irrelevant. Individuals literally do not exist in Hegelian metaphysics. It's easier to see the parallels with Christianity and Platonism once you realize that.
That explains why "continental philosophy" now means "the philosophy that the fascists chose to impose on continental Europe", and has a short list of ideas the Woke share with the Nazis.
Lines to pursue include:
- The term "social justice": A Nazi catch-phrase, taken from Plato.
- Racial essentialism.
- Foucault and power: He first studied philosophy as a closeted gay teenager, under strict Jesuit priests, under the occupation of the Nazis (Wikipedia). This is probably why he formed the opinion that the only power in the world is power itself. He probably picked this up from the Nazis, who picked it up from Nietzsche. So the claim that all social structures are nothing but power relations went: Schopenhauer > Nietzsche > Nazis > Foucault > SJWs. (Also, directly from Schopenhauer to Hitler. Hitler was a big fan of Schopenhauer.)
- Anti-rule-of-law: I found one philosophical article and one quotation, both by prominent Nazis, emphasizing that the fundamental Nazi legal principle was that the law is inherently bourgeois and counter-revolutionary, a tool of the oppressors which gets in the way of social justice. This principle can be traced back to Plato's Republic, as Eva Brann (an ethnic Jew who was born in Nazi Germany, but attended Yale) noted in her intro to The Republic: "For were these philosophers destined actually to govern, they would do so not through law and a science of government-the constitutional and administrative features of the philosopher's city are minimal-but in the light of the Whole, by a contingently applied wisdom. That is the reason why the One is in this dialogue named the Good-because from its contemplation flows the possibility of action which is not rule-ridden but truly adjusted to each case. Only because it is not a mere neutral oneness which encompasses and unifies the world, but the Good, can the world be the scene of unifying, fitting, effective, human, personal action (517 c), in short, of justice."
The essay also said that Jews don't instinctively understand German social justice, and must rely on law to protect them, so Jews brought the Hebrew spirit of Law and were corrupting Germany with it.
- Social constructivism: Was first formulated by German sociology professors in the 1930s.
- Phenomenological epistemology: Basically the principle that truth is subjective--that, since we have no access to noumena, all we can know is our own subjective phenomenological experiences. Both the Nazis and SJWs use this to justify a radically subjective sense of "truth" as validated not by fact or measurement, but by "lived experience" (the English translation of another Nazi buzzword, "Erlebnis", which the SJWs got from Sartre, who probably got it from Heidegger).
- Racial Authenticity: Another Nazi principle. Possibly also filtered thru Sartre, who spoke of "authenticity" but not of racial authenticity.
- White math (the mathematics of whites is different from that of other races): A concept introduced by Oswald Spengler in /Decline of the West/.
- The term "Woke": Also used by the Nazis. The first words of the SA's anthem were "Deutschland, erwache!" Originates AFAIK with the Puritan / Calvinist Great Awakenings in America in the 18th & 19th centuries. Puritans and other Calvinists were also hardcore Platonists, with a regular policy of killing people who disagreed with their religion (starting with Indian genocides in Mass. in the 17th century). There is some direct influence in this from the Puritans, without going thru the Nazis: the Puritans, and churches descended from them, founded Harvard, Yale, Princeton, U of Chicago, and quite a few other famous colleges.
Post-modernism: There's a book, /Hitler: Philosopher King/, arguing that the Nazis were the first post-modernists. Its evidence is weak forensically, but I think it's correct in pointing out that the Nazis were the first political party to effectively use post-modernist principles like social constructivism and deconstruction to destroy existing social conventions. I also found an essay in /The Third Reich Handbook/ giving a post-modernist argument that science is not a valid epistemology, but that truth is relative to race and lived experience. This overlaps with "phenomenology", above.
- Hegel: Marxists, Nazis, and the Woke are all Hegelian. The Woke don't cite Hegel much, but the people they cite, cite Hegel, or cite other people who cite Hegel. I suppose the Woke got Hegel more through Unitarian Universalism, and through phenomenology, than through the Nazis. (Husserl is always called the first phenomenologist, but it's all there already in Hegel, in /Science of Logic/, when he says that it's perfectly okay to take your private convictions as your fundamental axioms of logic.)
- Diversity: The Nazis claimed to embrace diversity and individuality, contrasting Nazi individuality with Bolshevik uniformity. Like the Woke, the Nazis claimed to value diversity by first excluding everyone who disagreed with them from consideration.
- Conflict theory: Since truth is subjective, and values are socially constructed, there is no rational way to arbitrate between worldviews. Such conflicts are always settled by power backed by violence.
- Existentialism: I don't know how much influence it had on the woke, but Sartre's existentialism is basically a rehash of Nazi philosophy (the claim that any morality you choose authentically is valid). That's because it's all based on Heidegger's writings (so I'm told; I'm not going to read either Being And Time or Being And Nothingness). It includes a lame argument thrown in to pretend that it doesn't justify Nazism. That argument is: I want to be free. For me to be free, everyone else must also be free. Therefore I must want everyone else to be free.
It was dumb of me to say "Sartre's existentialism is basically a rehash of Nazi philosophy". There are differences, but I think the similarities are more important. The Nazis said, "You cannot be good, because there is no Good. You can only be true to your race." Sartre changed it to "You cannot be good, because there is no Good. You can only be true to yourself." But humans can't be true only to themselves, because they're social animals. Maybe an orangutan or a male elephant could, but a lot of humans trying to be true to themselves will all sort into groups. So both philosophies should lead to similar results.
Very much yes to this post. Also, your footnote reminded me of this post, which is like the same thing except that instead of reason deconstructing religion/culture in the 2000s, it was postmodernism destroying rationality in the 1950s-1980s (give or take). We all have an awful lot of rebuilding to do. https://metarationality.com/stem-fluidity-bridge
I guess this is the Hegelian dialectic thing people talk about sometimes. Thesis > antithesis > synthesis. We're working on step 3 now, and we've learned that it's very important to avoid antithesizing so hard that you can't later synthesize. May we learn well and pass this lesson on to those who follow.
I've been thinking of picking up this book too. Looking forward to the chapter reviews.
Re. "Most humans need a religion": I'll say again, most people who have lived on Earth didn't have anything like a Western religion. They had beliefs about gods and spirits, but they didn't get their morals or their purpose for living from them. This 20th-century Western malaise and nihilism is the result of the collapse of a totalitarian religion, Christianity, which everyone in the West, whether Christian or not, was indoctrinated with from birth. Christianity forbids any purpose in life but that of serving God, and any moral reasoning other than blind obedience. So Christians, and people embedded in a Christian culture, never develop a purpose of their own or the capacity for moral reasoning. People suddenly deprived of the cultural swaddling of Christianity can't stand on their own because they never learned to walk, never developed the muscles.
This may be the case, but if so, you can't just take away the swaddling and expect people to walk. It takes a lot of work to develop muscles. For someone who's never done that and without any culture that teaches you how to do that, what else are you going to do but find another swaddle/crutch? You still need to move! A religion that takes the place of that and helps people to slowly build those muscles seems like a valuable thing, even if it's only around for a generation or two to transition into self-sufficiency culture
If you mean most humans in America today need a religion, then I agree. Historically, people who said "people need religion" meant "all people always have and always will need religion". Many of them accepted self-deception as a necessary permanent state, or dreamed up elitist totalitarian states in which a few enlightened people control the masses using something like religion. Like--sorry, I'm going to say it again--Plato. But also Rousseau (maybe not consciously), Hitler (very consciously), Mao (to whatever extent he actually cared about the state), and today's North Korean state. I don't want an exclusive focus on today's problem to make tomorrow's problem.
I also want to teach a new religion. I would call it Infinitism, since the Infinite is the thing that is present in every spiritual tradition, including atheistic Buddhism, and it would claim that it is not new: every world religion is a different school of Infinitism. I would also fold science into it, since science is an infinite endeavor: every scientific truth is always open to falsification, and I once read a scientist say that the proper scientific posture is to always be open to whatever experience can dish out, instead of trying to impose limitations on it, and the Infinite is that which admits no limitation.
Most people need a religion? This seems inconsistent with the fact that the least religious countries in Europe seem to be doing fine. Are the people in these countries latching onto some other thing you'd call a religion?
It also seems a stretch to call wokism a religion. It lacks several characteristics of typical religions, like a cosmogony, supernatural entities, an account of the afterlife.
I don't know any details of life in Europe, so I can't comment.
The magical parts of religion aren't the vital parts of it. I fear they might be necessary?? :( In order to have costly signals and buy-in. But the parts of religion that actually do the work in the world obviously aren't magic-based because they literally can't be. As Trace says, the core of a religion is the ideology that serves as ones epistemic and moral engine for navigating the world. And that's fully wokeism
https://twitter.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1718019769872392550
If the “necessary” part of religion is the ideology, then it seems more appropriate to say that people need ideology rather than that people need religion. But then I think that would be more false.
In the literature on the psychology of religion, religious people reliably report higher life satisfaction than non-religious people. But I think the consensus view is that this is because of the social support, not the ideology part of being religious.
And there also seem to be secular/non-ideological ways for people to bond together. Eg military involvement, gang involvement, sports, shared hobbies.
Hitler consciously changed Nazism into a religion, and it also lacked all those things. That's not a coincidence; Wokeism is descended from Nazism. It has the same metaphysics: Binary thought, phenomenological epistemology which delegitimizes science and fact, social constructivism to the point of believing consensus defines truth and that scientific truths are different for different races, racial essentialism and authenticity, racial purity, social unity, conflict theory, ethics based on absolute rules given a rank-ordering, and Hegelian progressivism (a kind of "manifest destiny"). You can trace its philosophical foundations back through French existentialists and post-modernists to the Nazis and their precursors: Heidegger, Spengler, Hegel, Fichte, and others. (Marx is a big influence, but I think not so much on its metaphysics, because Marx didn't think carefully about metaphysics.)
A key thing to realize about the closely-related Hegelian, Marxist, Nazi, and Woke religions is that they invest the group, not the individual, with free will, rights, and a soul. Their Heaven is for the culture, not for individuals, who are helpless and irrelevant. Individuals literally do not exist in Hegelian metaphysics. It's easier to see the parallels with Christianity and Platonism once you realize that.
Do you have a post or series of posts (or something similar) that lays this out in more detail? It sounds fascinating
I haven't. The only polished thing I've written on it is in "Steven Pinker's Rationality Versus Western Philosophy", in the sub-section "The Nazis won the war": https://docs.google.com/document/d/1X4LDOVN8O0EILqIddyYBqiBTe7Z3hjZGcK2Am1eZCpU/edit#heading=h.6nnxthhwclyk
That explains why "continental philosophy" now means "the philosophy that the fascists chose to impose on continental Europe", and has a short list of ideas the Woke share with the Nazis.
Lines to pursue include:
- The term "social justice": A Nazi catch-phrase, taken from Plato.
- Racial essentialism.
- Foucault and power: He first studied philosophy as a closeted gay teenager, under strict Jesuit priests, under the occupation of the Nazis (Wikipedia). This is probably why he formed the opinion that the only power in the world is power itself. He probably picked this up from the Nazis, who picked it up from Nietzsche. So the claim that all social structures are nothing but power relations went: Schopenhauer > Nietzsche > Nazis > Foucault > SJWs. (Also, directly from Schopenhauer to Hitler. Hitler was a big fan of Schopenhauer.)
- Anti-rule-of-law: I found one philosophical article and one quotation, both by prominent Nazis, emphasizing that the fundamental Nazi legal principle was that the law is inherently bourgeois and counter-revolutionary, a tool of the oppressors which gets in the way of social justice. This principle can be traced back to Plato's Republic, as Eva Brann (an ethnic Jew who was born in Nazi Germany, but attended Yale) noted in her intro to The Republic: "For were these philosophers destined actually to govern, they would do so not through law and a science of government-the constitutional and administrative features of the philosopher's city are minimal-but in the light of the Whole, by a contingently applied wisdom. That is the reason why the One is in this dialogue named the Good-because from its contemplation flows the possibility of action which is not rule-ridden but truly adjusted to each case. Only because it is not a mere neutral oneness which encompasses and unifies the world, but the Good, can the world be the scene of unifying, fitting, effective, human, personal action (517 c), in short, of justice."
The essay also said that Jews don't instinctively understand German social justice, and must rely on law to protect them, so Jews brought the Hebrew spirit of Law and were corrupting Germany with it.
- Social constructivism: Was first formulated by German sociology professors in the 1930s.
- Phenomenological epistemology: Basically the principle that truth is subjective--that, since we have no access to noumena, all we can know is our own subjective phenomenological experiences. Both the Nazis and SJWs use this to justify a radically subjective sense of "truth" as validated not by fact or measurement, but by "lived experience" (the English translation of another Nazi buzzword, "Erlebnis", which the SJWs got from Sartre, who probably got it from Heidegger).
- Racial Authenticity: Another Nazi principle. Possibly also filtered thru Sartre, who spoke of "authenticity" but not of racial authenticity.
- White math (the mathematics of whites is different from that of other races): A concept introduced by Oswald Spengler in /Decline of the West/.
- The term "Woke": Also used by the Nazis. The first words of the SA's anthem were "Deutschland, erwache!" Originates AFAIK with the Puritan / Calvinist Great Awakenings in America in the 18th & 19th centuries. Puritans and other Calvinists were also hardcore Platonists, with a regular policy of killing people who disagreed with their religion (starting with Indian genocides in Mass. in the 17th century). There is some direct influence in this from the Puritans, without going thru the Nazis: the Puritans, and churches descended from them, founded Harvard, Yale, Princeton, U of Chicago, and quite a few other famous colleges.
Post-modernism: There's a book, /Hitler: Philosopher King/, arguing that the Nazis were the first post-modernists. Its evidence is weak forensically, but I think it's correct in pointing out that the Nazis were the first political party to effectively use post-modernist principles like social constructivism and deconstruction to destroy existing social conventions. I also found an essay in /The Third Reich Handbook/ giving a post-modernist argument that science is not a valid epistemology, but that truth is relative to race and lived experience. This overlaps with "phenomenology", above.
- Hegel: Marxists, Nazis, and the Woke are all Hegelian. The Woke don't cite Hegel much, but the people they cite, cite Hegel, or cite other people who cite Hegel. I suppose the Woke got Hegel more through Unitarian Universalism, and through phenomenology, than through the Nazis. (Husserl is always called the first phenomenologist, but it's all there already in Hegel, in /Science of Logic/, when he says that it's perfectly okay to take your private convictions as your fundamental axioms of logic.)
- Diversity: The Nazis claimed to embrace diversity and individuality, contrasting Nazi individuality with Bolshevik uniformity. Like the Woke, the Nazis claimed to value diversity by first excluding everyone who disagreed with them from consideration.
- Conflict theory: Since truth is subjective, and values are socially constructed, there is no rational way to arbitrate between worldviews. Such conflicts are always settled by power backed by violence.
- Existentialism: I don't know how much influence it had on the woke, but Sartre's existentialism is basically a rehash of Nazi philosophy (the claim that any morality you choose authentically is valid). That's because it's all based on Heidegger's writings (so I'm told; I'm not going to read either Being And Time or Being And Nothingness). It includes a lame argument thrown in to pretend that it doesn't justify Nazism. That argument is: I want to be free. For me to be free, everyone else must also be free. Therefore I must want everyone else to be free.
It was dumb of me to say "Sartre's existentialism is basically a rehash of Nazi philosophy". There are differences, but I think the similarities are more important. The Nazis said, "You cannot be good, because there is no Good. You can only be true to your race." Sartre changed it to "You cannot be good, because there is no Good. You can only be true to yourself." But humans can't be true only to themselves, because they're social animals. Maybe an orangutan or a male elephant could, but a lot of humans trying to be true to themselves will all sort into groups. So both philosophies should lead to similar results.
Very much yes to this post. Also, your footnote reminded me of this post, which is like the same thing except that instead of reason deconstructing religion/culture in the 2000s, it was postmodernism destroying rationality in the 1950s-1980s (give or take). We all have an awful lot of rebuilding to do. https://metarationality.com/stem-fluidity-bridge
I guess this is the Hegelian dialectic thing people talk about sometimes. Thesis > antithesis > synthesis. We're working on step 3 now, and we've learned that it's very important to avoid antithesizing so hard that you can't later synthesize. May we learn well and pass this lesson on to those who follow.
I've been thinking of picking up this book too. Looking forward to the chapter reviews.