Naked Emperors, Gell-Mann Memory, and the return of the Spiritual

On the latest raft of posts about rising and falling religious beliefs.

When I was an undergraduate, I cycled through majors as I’d cycled through interests in life generally¹: history, art history, music, philosophy, and eventually what was called at my school “religious studies,” a part of the philosophy department.² I liked religious studies primarily because the faculty were interested in and appreciative of students —not being an in-demand area, of course— and one could study nearly anything, including all of what I’d previously studied: music, art, history, philosophy, within any number of traditions or cultures.³ It was extremely fun.

In the decades since, I’ve noted with amusement the steady appearance of reports about the rise or decline of religious beliefs. News articles depend on an implicit contextual myth: that each one is part of some larger, enduringly meaningful story of the world and constitutes deep information about reality, even though a very large percentage of them seem meaningless, hopelessly partial, or fully mistaken in a matter of months or years; they often seem so immediately to people familiar with whatever subject they cover, a well-known issue.⁴ With stories about religions, this situation is even more comical: world religions outlive not only phases of history, not only countries, but whole civilizations, entire languages, forms of government, configurations of human society, to say nothing of technological or conceptual paradigms.⁵ When Newsweek announces that from 2012 to 2017, we see such-and-such trend, it reminds me of nothing so much as when teenagers announce that they’re no longer into some cultural product that previously structured their whole existence, and now create their identity from another. It’s polite to take it seriously, of course, but if one knows how anything works, it’s also impossible: the succession of minute adjustments, indicating nothing significant, is not going to abate.

And if one has a global perspective, the situation is even more ludicrous! As some population here moves away from ritual participation in a faith, another population there surges more dramatically into it. These local, snapshot views are a kind of fantasist noise, the fantasy being that this moment in history is dramatically important, and that our concepts and cultures are decisively shaping a future unimaginable without our takes, that we are not creatures of empty babble and error like our ancestors but are instead really working something out. Indeed! And perhaps we won’t die!

In any event, there’s been a seeming uptick in posts about growing religious belief and participation in the United States. It’s as confused as ever: one can find at this very moment articles noting both an increase and a decrease in the very same demographics. This reporting usually offers some speculation on causes, and while I think that it’s so causally dense that it’s almost not worth analyzing —and further personally believe in a set of real causes that no news article will ever mention, like “the grace of God,” for example— one cause I find interesting seems not to have been discussed: the progressive disgrace of all ostensibly authoritative groups over the last couple of decades.⁶

I think it’s worked like this:

1. Over the first part of this century, we’ve seen a near-total collapse of the myth of “an elite” or “an elect.” Almost every constituency has demonstrated a capacity for error so great that mimetic imitation of e.g. “intellectuals” or “scientists” or “the morally upstanding” or “the strong-willed leaders” or “business tycoons” or “artists” seems absurd. These people know nothing. All actual and potential emperors have been revealed to be naked, or rather: we have rediscovered the primal nakedness of the human being before the complexities and challenges of the world. There are periods where it seems as though some are wearing fine clothes indeed: attired in such a way as to be something more than error-prone, hypocritical, desperate mortals. I tend to think such periods occur especially when new media or new social configurations temporarily obscure reality, as when the Internet briefly made it appear that some correct assortment of beliefs or styles or capacities or appearances or even possessions made one just, wise, superior. It has taken everyone time to see the evil or stupidity or self-dealing that seeps into everything, that rots every constituency, that humiliates every idol, but I think by now many have, once again.⁷

2. Another way to put this is that there was a collapse of authority. This was the largely gentle authority of the educated or the sophisticated or powerful, and I note that it could be found across the political spectra. It was an authority less of control than of mimetic dominance: the ones who looked (often on television or online) like they were worth imitating or trusting all aligned on certain things, one of which was a “post-religious” orientation, and this was as true on e.g. the American right as on the left. A very common religious point of view is that “this world in all particulars, including material concerns and even in terms of life and death, is less important than some other world or other plane of existence,” and very few people of economic or cultural or political import seemed to operate as though they believed this was the case, regardless of the faiths they professed.⁸ For a while, such “important” people seemed to be authorities on life, on questions of value, on what is sometimes called “culture” or “philosophy,” and it was possible for many to e.g. dismiss religion solely because “no one they saw who seemed good and ascending took it seriously,” though they generally had other rationalizations. Over time, however, more have realized that few are good and few are permanently ascending, at least not enough to be worth imitating unthinkingly. The smartest routinely blow it in ways that can only be described as dumb; the strongest get their asses kicked; the wisest humiliate themselves; the most moralizing do great evil. If the Internet initially fostered the illusion of some number of elect scenes, it also steadily eroded the possibility of believing in any of them.

3. That the collapse of authority would lead to increased religious belief would surprise many critics of religion, who imagine that religions have been “imposed by authority” on peoples throughout history. But religions have emerged from peoples throughout history, and often from the margins; furthermore, they are often the province of sensitive, intelligent, and sincerely attentive people within societies who do not compete to master the levels of power at all. The phenomena that lead to religious belief are continually present; nothing in the history of physics has answered the cosmological question, and nothing in the totality of journalism has accounted for the full range of events and experiences humans have on Earth, and nothing in the domain of biology has explained how life could come from non-life, and nothing in the field of psychology has described how the mind works to any real degree of scientific precision. For a time, we could take it on elite authority that these mysteries must all have been disposed of, or would be very soon —why else would the actors and politicians and musicians and writers be “post”-religious, after all?— but it’s clearer than ever that these authorities are as lost and as compromised as anyone has ever been, as foolish as the rest of us. This puts the matter back in the minds of individuals and communities.

4. Individuals who begin to explore these questions are often stunned to find that they’re all still completely open, that there was no “new discovery” that closed them, that modern thinkers who have attended to them consider them very much alive, that only mimetic lackeys ever thought otherwise, and that none of the science or history that they’ve assumed settled things in fact does so. It’s dizzying, and I think a very powerful experience. No one knows more about the origin of the universe than you do. This seems purely exciting to me, and I am not surprised that when people must navigate it all for themselves, they —like a profusion of the most serious thinkers in human history— find their way to belief in one or another religious tradition. Since nothing has happened that would update our priors except the development of certain vibes among certain sets of mimetically central cohorts, now by and large embarrassed, the ancient literature (e.g. in philosophy) is as relevant as ever. This offends the modern spirit, which likes to believe it’s “really made a lot of progress,” but recent chaos has, I think, made more people open to the possibility that much of that progress was illusory. Indeed: where are those who feel that “we have it all figured out” now? How brief was their moment in the sun? Who is now so high on the supply of the 21st century’s materials that they think: “The thinking behind all this is surely ideal and complete! Our ancestors were idiots”?

In sum: the people we assumed knew what they were talking about didn’t; the world they seemed to create is ambiguously persuasive of their expertise or intelligence or moral righteousness; and we’ve had to begin again the quest to understand what the hell is happening here on Earth. When we do so, we find that first, a much wider variety of theories are taken seriously by those who care to think about these things than was implied by the tone of many elites (e.g. the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics as a literal matter, or the simulation hypotheses in various forms), and second, a tremendous amount of prior work from centuries past is valuable and even persuasive.⁹

Relatedly, we cannot help but note that even the most fortunate and successful seem not to have improved, in personal human terms, on the character or happiness of their forebears. Aging celebrities of all fields give the lie to the possibility that even fame, even creative success, even social esteem (let alone wealth!) constitutes a real way of being; somehow, only those outside the frame of society seem to be on paths worth contemplating as guides. If one is on the left, one perhaps blames capitalism; if one is on the right, one perhaps blames modernity. In either case, the situation is the same; one turns away from the glib and shallow memeplexes of the present and recognizes that there will be no deliverance from within them; airport book store titles are probably not going to settle the eternal questions for you. The same impulse that leads many to recognize the value of Buddhism as psychology, over other psychological schools, leads to interest in Buddhism as a real theory of reality, for example: as a religion. One can only witness so many faith communities or rituals who seem happier, healthier, and stronger before one starts to wonder.¹⁰

This seems to me like a major part of what’s happening, in any event. It’s subtle, because it’s not that there’s e.g. “new evidence for religious belief”; it’s more that illusory “evidence” against religious belief —in the form of vague cultural propensities of elite groups that once seemed authoritative— has lost persuasive power. It’s been diffuse, too: not that a single elect was exposed, and not that any single counter-elect or movement rose, but rather than for countless individuals, it’s no longer sensible to just adopt the vibes of whichever irreligious faction they once trusted, and they now must follow their own paths and look at the world with their own eyes, a state which leads in all sorts of directions: towards major institutional religions, towards improvised alternative spiritualities, etc. Some wind up traditionalists; others work out new paganisms on TikTok. Sales of both rosaries and crystals are up, I have no doubt.

I don’t expect this to change in the near future. In particular, I predict that the continued development of LLMs, and “AI” broadly, will force people into one of two positions:

1. They will pretend that “whatever these are is all there is,” as prior generations imagined the body as a pneumatic engine; they may come to insist that if LLMs cannot do something, neither can humans, as when in the era of mechanistic determinism some pretended that we do not have free will (while continuing to live in every way as though we do, one of the most incredible commitments to a bit I’ve seen in human history). They will, in other words, deny the mystery to preserve their sense of knowing, however ludicrous and abstracted this position is.

2. They will have to acknowledge that there is still some overt and consequential mystery to us, even though we can look right into the nuclei of the atoms in a brain, can code our way to a form of language-use, can muster immense quantities of energy and computation and proffer explanations that reach across scales and times unimaginable to those who lived mere centuries ago. And to even discuss this mystery requires the use of words forbidden to thinking people: anima, soul, spirit, God, etc., the same words used by those who contemplated these matters in the past.

If I am correct, those in the former category will likely say that the latter category’s thinking stems from “improperly formed questions.” Even now, some dispute that asking “why is there something rather than nothing” is sensible! But it seems clearer than ever that when emperors of any kind forbid certain questions, it is never out of epistemic precision but rather something much more typically human: it’s a matter of pride. Whether that pride seems sufficiently merited as to justify profound deference, to justify suppressing the most natural and obvious inquiries —or whether it just seems like the same old eternal and pernicious sin at the root of a great deal of human mischief— is once again something individuals are sorting out for themselves.

Jim Dine, Atheism, 1986.

1. Both more and less about me than I acknowledge is typical of people with what they call bipolar disorder.

2. Religious studies has its issues, but I escaped dynamics in the philosophy department I found far more irritating; I swapped “snide people using cleverness to pursue mildly novel and thoroughly niche positions” for “out and out weirdos who couldn’t decouple if their souls’ salvation depended on it.”

3. I also think God was helping me stay in touch with him, although at the time I was an avowed atheist.

4. This whole post is probably just saying “we are finally defeating Gell-Mann Amnesia.”

5. More people should read A Canticle for Leibowitz.

6. Jackson Mohsenin helpfully noted that a lot of this is likely from or influenced by Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public.

7. As David Cole noted, for Gen X, this was a foundational element of the worldview anyway, which speaks for the umpteenth time to the Boomer-Millennial / Gen X-Gen Y harmonies.

8. There’s an obvious selection effect here: mostly those who believe in the importance of e.g. economics will rise to prominence in economics; you have to believe that the state is really meaningful to spend your life climbing to the top of the state; etc.

9. I never tire of Haldane’s formulation, even through I quibble with the implied incapacity of mind and believe it leads to the exact opposite conclusion he reached: “The Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”

10. I think a major challenge for atheists remains to explain why in every area of human activity, truth produces better results than error except with religion: why religious communities outperform secular communities in so many ways if it’s all nonsense, why religious civilizations outperform secular civilizations, etc.