Reason, Religion, and the Fate of Humanity

The Old Ways

In his book Antifragile, Nassim Talib claims that those things which have been around the longest are likely to endure the longest into the future. The corollary is that things which have been recently introduced are less likely to last. He provides the following heuristic: for any given practice, idea, or invention, we are about at about the halfway point of its existence or use.

If this is accurate, then consider the following:

• Spoons have been around since about 1000 BCE. They probably aren’t going anywhere soon. But maybe by the year 5024 they will have outlived their usefulness.
• The wheel was invented by the Sumerians about 6000 years ago. That gives us roughly until the year 8000 to enjoy this most popular of all labor saving devices.
• The cell phone, alas, only has another 50 years to go.
• And I’m relieved to know that we only have to endure social media until 2044.

Of course, the idea that we are in the middle of the lifespan of all trends can’t possibly be an enduring principle. If this were the case, logically speaking, no trend would ever end and no trend would ever start.  But as with some other of Talib’s ideas, it is both unlikely and insightful at that same time. I think that another, perhaps more helpful, way of getting at the thing that Talib trying to name, is that at any given moment in history there are more human practices, inventions, and trends which are passing than enduring. And how do we know if any particular thing is enduring or passing? Easy: ask how long has it been around. The longer it has been around, the more likely that it will be around in the future. This does have some serious purchase and is worth pondering in our age of innovation where the agreed upon premise seems to be that the old ways are being replaced every day by the new. Because it turns out that many of the new things which are presented as replacements for the old are themselves replaced. Just ask Blackberry, Nokia, and Google Glass.

Books Didn’t Go Away

The print book is a great example. Digitization suggested to many people in the late 90s and early 00s that print books were on their way out. During this time I worked at a publisher that was busy digitizing books and was full of hubristic certainty that those clunky old bound volumes would not be around much longer. Consider the work involved in turning all those pages! But wait a minute. Printed books have been around since the ninth century, in China, and the 16th century in Europe. This suggests that print books aren’t going anywhere. And what has happened in practice? The presses are still running. Look forward to future listicles of discarded devices which include the Game Boy, 8-tracks, and the Kindle.

To be clear, I’m no luddite. I love technology and I love the way that we are humans in the modern world, with our myriad technological extensions of the body and the mind. The reason Talib’s principle intrigues me is that it makes me wonder if this technological society we live in is doomed to fail. Animal drawn carts have been the main form of transportation for thousands of years. Does this mean that they will still be so in the distant future? The main source of heat throughout the centuries has been burning wood. Does that mean that electrical or propane heat are bound to fade as quickly as they came into being? To say nothing of atomic energy.

Here’s the one that interests me the most: religion. It’s hard to say exactly when people started to worship the deity that is described in the pages of Christian scripture, but 1000 BC is a decent guess. According to Talib, this means that we have another 3000 years to enjoy Christianity. Or, using the more general principle: Christianity isn’t going anywhere. Neither is religion in general, which seems to have been a feature of being human from day one.

And in contrast, we must wonder if an approach to life based on reason and scientific knowledge is just a passing trend. The modern world has, for the most part, rejected the idea that religion should be authoritative in society and culture. But this trend is a mere 200–300 years old. Compared to the potent and enduring combination of religion and political authoritarianism, it is as much of an upstart as cable TV. And here’s the hook to today: it seems that many people, not just in the US, but around the world, are eagerly embracing religious based authoritarianism, or at least strong men who give religion an seat at the table of power. Is this one the last desperate grab for power of a dying way of life, or is it the old ways reasserting themselves as they are bound to do, simply because old way always win in the end?

Exit Religion?

Traditional religion is on the wane, this much is clear. And the connection between the decrease of religion and the rise modern world is well documented: as societies become more technological, people tend to become more secular. Even if the trappings of religion remain, religious belief and practice becomes less extreme, religious dogma loses its bite, and morality that is based on religious tradition is combined with a more rational approach to ethics. And so the progress of reason, through technology, over religion has a feeling of inevitability. But if technology is the driver for secularism, what happens when you take away technology? What happens if modern society crashes and burns and we are thrown back to a world where, say, the ability to harness electricity becomes rare, and mass production of goods becomes impossible, and the speed of communication reverts back to the speed of human travel? All our recent modern innovations are fragile in the sense that they require a massive technical infrastructure which is not a given for humans. Put a bunch of people on an island without any tools, and they will probably act like humans acted 10,000 years ago. That is sustainable, so long as the world continues to exist. Cell phones and transatlantic fights? Not so much.

I was fascinated to see these ideas play out in a recent interview between Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Seminary, and the secular sociologist Phil Zuckerman. Mohler was interested in the secularizing trend because, well, he could be out of job if things keep going the way they are–let alone out of a religion. Zuckerman explained how the secularizing trend works. The key factor is that religion decreases when human suffering and insecurity is alleviated. This is why countries in Scandinavia (also Japan and South Korea) are notably more secular than others. These countries have done the best job at providing childcare, elder care, and subsidized physical and mental healthcare. They also have low crime and murder rates and accessible education, and they are politically democratic. To be clear, Zuckerman’s argument is not theoretical, but data driven: when we observe lower levels of existential insecurity, we also observe a decrease in religion. And the opposite is also true: higher levels of existential insecurity go hand in hand with higher levels of religion.

At one point in the interview, Mohler asked Zuckerman to apply his sociological training to the question that mattered the most to Mohler: How can secularization be slowed down or even reversed? I couldn’t help but chuckle because I could tell where this was going. In fact, why was Mohler even asking it, since the answer was bound to bring up strange and uncomfortable implications? Simply this: if personal insecurity increases, secularization will decrease.  As Zuckerman put it, “If life gets more miserable, I hate to say this, I think that’s good for religion.” He also mentioned that political and ethnic sectarianism tend to bring out religion, which is obviously just the same principle. Anyone who has been paying attention the last few years has seen the connection between religion, sectarianism, and authoritarianism play out right before their own eyes. Social and political strife don’t just make people pray more and go to church more. As they turn to religion to find solace and hope, they also turn to human leaders who seem to be pointing in the same direction as their religious values and aspirations, and they put their trust in these leaders to fix things.

But the most shocking thing for me was to realize the direct connection between the defeaters of secularization and the political agenda of the religiously motivated political right, which seems calculated to increase existential insecurity:

• a pro-gun agenda guns means more violence,
• less controls on authority figures mean less consistency in the political realm and the erosion of democracy,
• a habit of anti-intellectualism means a denigration of education and its benefits,
• opposition to subsidized medicine means higher levels of financial instability and worry,
• and some on the right even want to do away with government funded retirement and elder healthcare.

Its almost as if republicans have read Zuckerman’s work and drawn the rational conclusion: if you want to bring back religion, make life more miserable. Walk back all the hard-fought victories of secularism. Democracy, education, and healthcare might have alleviated human suffering and made people happier, but at what cost? Make them suffer more and they will come crawling back to God!

In a subsequent email exchange with Zuckerman we both agreed that it is highly unlikely that people on the right are explicitly making this connection and self-consciously attempting to hold back progress in the name of God. On the other hand, though, the pattern is really there. Surely these basic facts of secularism and religion are motivators on some level. For example, conservatives notice that people who talk about socialism also tend to be secular, and so a connection is made: the social safety net is a machination of godless modernists. And they are kind of right. Never mind that it’s nice to get food stamps when you’re broke and your kids are hungry.

The reason that religion is enduring, has been around and will probably be around for a long time, is that it is intimately connected to the human experience. The human struggle for survival and meaning makes God and religion plausible. As the struggle decreases, so does that plausibility. But this struggle is our natural state, and so religion is bound up with the most basic biological facts of being human. But modernity, enlightenment reason, technical mastery, and democracy are a surprising and very recent exception to this state. We tend to think that whatever we have achieved to date is a given. That it is the new baseline. That it can’t be walked back. I don’t think that’s a safe assumption, and to recognize this is to understand that there is some urgency to the task of defending our hard-fought gains.