I’ve been saying for a long time that what we are up against is a religion. (In 2017 I made the case contra Bill Vallicella, who was reluctant to apply the term.)
At the very least, I think it’s helpful to borrow a technique from the philosopher Daniel Dennett, who coined the term “the intentional stance” to describe how we should approach systems that might not possess “intrinsic intentionality”, such as a chess computer, but for which treating them as if they were genuinely intentional provides us with the most predictive and most clarifying model.
Dennett describes the intentional stance as follows:
Here is how it works: first you decide to treat the object whose behavior is to be predicted as a rational agent; then you figure out what beliefs that agent ought to have, given its place in the world and its purpose. Then you figure out what desires it ought to have, on the same considerations, and finally you predict that this rational agent will act to further its goals in the light of its beliefs. A little practical reasoning from the chosen set of beliefs and desires will in most instances yield a decision about what the agent ought to do; that is what you predict the agent will do.
In the same way, even if you are inclined to quibble about whether Wokeness is in fact a religion, I think we are entirely justified in adopting “the religious stance” toward it. Dennett’s explanation is easily refitted for the purpose:
Here is how it works: first you decide to treat the object whose behavior is to be predicted as a religious system; then you figure out what beliefs that system’s adherents ought to have, given its place in the world and its purpose. Then you figure out what goals the religion ought to have, on the same considerations, and finally you predict that this religious system will act to further its goals in the light of its beliefs. A little practical reasoning from the chosen set of beliefs and desires will in most instances yield a decision about what the religion’s faithful ought to do; that is what you predict the faithful will do.
I ask you: can anyone seriously look at this and not think we are dealing with a species of religion?
Also, ask yourself this: how would Wokeness manifest itself any differently if it were a religion?
Others have begun to make this case. John McWhorter adopts this stance in his book Woke Racism, while Michael Vlahos has been calling this movement the “Church of Woke” for at least a year or two now. Mencius Moldbug has been making the historical/genealogical/political case ever since the early days of his influential blog Unqualified Reservations, from which I often quote this piquant passage:
If you have a rule that says the state cannot be taken over by a church, a constant danger in any democracy for obvious reasons, the obvious mutation to circumvent this defense is for the church to find some plausible way of denying that it’s a church. Dropping theology is a no-brainer. Game over, you lose, and it serves you right for vaccinating against a nonfunctional surface protein.
Now Michael Schellenberg has posted a substantial item at Substack called “Why Wokeism Is A Religion“. What makes the article of particular interest is a detailed, zoomable graphic presenting the many, many qualities manifested by Wokeism that are also common features of religious systems. (You can see that presentation here.)
The case, I think, is overwhelming.
11 Comments
I agree with Moldbug that the disestablishment clause created strong evolutionary pressure against overt religions and in favor of covert religions. This is most evident in our supposedly secular schools and universities. The Christian symbols have been scrubbed and Woke icons are everywhere. A Christian professor would be disciplined for “sharing his faith,” but not a feminist professor.
If you are an infidel with respect to the new faith, you will soon learn that it is a faith from the way its votaries treat you. Your existence offends them because you are unclean and taboo. Although I am a Christian, I can to a point laugh with the freethinkers when they mock my pieties. Try that with Woke pieties and you will learn that they take their faith very seriously. They are like Muslims in that respect.
In the current environment, the selective pressure of religious evolution favors crypsis and pugnacity, which is why the established Christian churches are doomed. Looking like everyone’s idea of a religion and turning the other cheek are dinosaur traits and the end of the Cretaceous is at hand.
On a more positive note, we should not forget that this is all a “social construct” since crypsis is a product of the first amendment and pugnacity exploits a cultivated guilt. Wokeism requires a septic environment to flourish.
“Is X a religion”?
I think a case can be made that, unless X is the worship of and the glorying in the Creator ,then X is indeed a social construct, and what the bible calls ‘idolatry’.
That sounds too fundamentalist? Just trying to point out that arguments about X being a religion or not, turn out to be arguments over whose definition of ‘religion’ is ‘correct’.
DaveB,
Yes, there’s a lot of haggling over definitions going on. (Would you call Buddhism, which doesn’t worship a Creator, a “religion”?)
This is exactly why I want to short-circuit the quarreling about definitions by borrowing and modifying Dennett’s idea of the “intentional stance”.
JMS,
Yes, just so. What’s key here is that the selection pressure upon religions (religions, that is, as defined above by Dave B, and as imagined by the Framers) is increased a hundredfold by the simultaneous triumph of positivist scientific materialism (which is of course a faith of its own: namely that what we can learn about the physical spacetime system, using physical tools, is all that we can believe to exist.)
This simultaneous pressure, from both the Constitution and secular materialism, means that the evolutionary “niche” for viable belief-systems — and humans will always have belief-systems, even if they flatter themselves otherwise — has narrowed so as to make theistic religion, with genuinely transcendent metaphysics, very poorly adapted. This (recently) modified habitat strongly favors rechanneling the universal religious impulse into stunted, truncated cryptids, and so we see these opportunistic species of mutated religions flourishing, and driving out the competition.
That photo of fossilized old people who needed ‘stage hands’ to help them into this begging position and needed the same hands to recover from this position screams ‘let us keep power and control’. We will do anything, even wear the slavers cloth if we can keep our power positions. Sad theater for a sad small religion. A religion of grievances.
I find the difference between the concepts ‘religion’ and ‘faith’ to be useful.
The interesting conversation between Malcolm and Bill will not, I think, be resolved (if resolution is the goal: a fruitful inquiry and mutual stimulation are worthy goals as well) – without that agreement on what religion is/isn’t.
OTOH, asking what a person’s Faith is can be very enlightening. It takes religion out of the conversation and exposes presuppositions and world-views that amount to a faith; and most of the -isms are in fact statements of a faith, are they not?
Finding out that we all have a faith – or several of them – takes the condescension out of too-smug believers and the sneer off the face of the secularist.
DaveB,
Yes, and the distinction you make between religion and faith is an important one that should always be kept in mind.
Most secularists won’t admit (even to themselves) that they have any sort of faith at all; they imagine that they “believe nothing without evidence”.
I recently read David Sloan Wilson’s book, Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society. My review here:
http://ptaylor.space/peter/dswilson.htm
D. S. Wilson uses two formal definitions of religion:
1. “Religion consists of very general explanations that justify and specify the terms of exchange with a god or gods.” (Rodney Stark and William Bainbridge)
2. “A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden–beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.” (Emile Durkheim) For Durkheim, an institution is “religious” if it obtains its power from a sense of sacredness. Wilson writes, “To regard something as sacred is to subordinate oneself to it, to obey its demands.”
Wilson also writes (per Eric Dietrich), “Spirituality is in part a feeling of being connected to something larger than oneself. Religion is in part a collection of beliefs and practices that honor spirituality.”
I like James Lindsay’s definition, “Religion is that which you do in order to be a good person.”
I’m also tempted to argue that religion is anything that the government uses (or opposes) in order to prop up its own moral legitimacy.
Wilson finds Durkheim’s definition too broad, but Stark’s too narrow and shallow. He favors the former because it expresses the function of religion (uniting people into a moral community). Stark’s definition implies belief in a god or gods, which Durkheim’s definition doesn’t require. Wilson instead defines a broader category of “unifying systems”, of which religion is a fuzzy subset, along with political systems, and he says it is a mistake to try to isolate them from one another. Even if gods were essential to “religion”, we would still want to know what other “unifying systems” substitute for them.
Wilson writes, “Our tendency to think of religion as a distinct kind of social organization may be influenced by the separation of church and state during very recent times. Needless to say, this is a poor foundation for thinking about religion at a fundamental level.”
Religious war here we come!
Peter Taylor,
I lean more toward Durkheim’s definition.
While this is a complex topic as regards the actual truth or falsity of religious belief, I think it’s overwhelmingly evident, as David Sloan Wilson understands, that an instinctive knack for religion is a fundamental and universal component the human psyche, and of human societies, and is conducive to the cohesion and competitive advantage of human groups. (Churchill understood this too!)
I’ve written about this here at the blog on many occasions. Here, for example, is a post from 2009 about Darwin’s Cathedral, and here is a post from the same year about the corrosive effect of secularism. (Back then I was still, pretty much, a philosophical materialist myself; these days, not so much.)
Thanks for commenting. I’ll have a look at your review of Wilson’s book.
A comment from elsewhere on McWhorter’s book:
“But what elements of the left aren’t a substitute for religion? Since we’re currently living in the version of the Matrix that was programmed by Tom Wolfe before his death in 2018, it’s worth quoting from in his epochal 1976 article, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening:” “It is entirely possible that in the long run historians will regard the entire New Left experience as not so much a political as a religious episode wrapped in semi military gear and guerrilla talk.” (That line was written with early ‘70s radical chic in mind, but reverberates quite nicely today, given Antifa’s love of paramilitary cosplay.)”