The inevitable march of secularism? Not so fast

[old_gregg]

Marchant is speaking from a flawed and outdated model for how rational thinking and decision-making occurs. The idea that emotions are irrational impulses that lead to irrational thinking and decision-making is incorrect.

"When emotion is entirely left out of the reasoning picture, as happens in certain neurological conditions, reason turns out to be even more flawed than when emotion plays bad tricks on our decisions." (preface, Decartes Error - Antonio Damasio)

"The action of biological drives, body states and emotions may be an indispensable foundation for rationality. The lower levels in the neural edifice of reason are the same that regulate the processing of emotions and feelings, along with global functions of the body proper such that the organism can survive. These lower levels maintain direct and mutual relationships with the body proper, thus placing the body within the chain of operations that permit the highest reaches of reason and creativity. Rationality is probably shaped and modulated by body signals, even as it performs the most sublime distinctions and acts accordingly. (p.200, Decartes Error - Antonio Damasio)

but what does it enfold

[tooblue]

but what does it enfold

According to Bohm, everything.

[SeattleUte]

Not sure I would interpret it that way. For me, the main point was that there is an assumption that the broad adoption of science (in all variations) would result in universal secularization. "The march of time is one-directional." That has not happened, especially if you take a global view. Furthermore, this linkage of science to secularization is arguably harmful to science. As societies lash back against secularization, they are often lashing back at science, i.e., throwing out the baby with the bathwater. That is unfortunate.

I think I agree with creekster. At the same time, I think the science vs. religion forumulation misses the issue for other reasons. I recently read a terrrific book about this, "Age of Anger: A History of the Present," by Pankaj Mishra. The book provides a broad, comprehensive, interdisciplinary analysis of science vs. religion that I think is almost always lacking among Mormons and exmos of all kinds. The book was one of those books that altered my view; it did not change my values as to science vs. religion, but changed or broadened my perspective on the problem.

Raised and educated in India, Mishra is a scholar in English universities and overall gadfly. The New Yorker article I’ve linked by Adam Gopnik is helpful to read as an introduction to the book; I first learned about “Age of Anger” from the article, and Gopnik provides an in-depth, admiring critique of the book. The touchstone of this narrative is a powerful description of a friendship developed between Timothy McVeigh and Ramzi Yousef (he tried to blow up the WTC before 9/11) in the maximum security prison that housed them. If it's possible to shed sympathetic light on such people, Mishra does it. And he thinks they're cut from the same cloth. Radical Islam is not about Islam; it's about the same reaction to modernism that led to the Romantic Age, red state American religion, the Ku Klux Klan, Hitler, fascist Italy, Franco's Spain, Trump, Brexit, and radical contemporary Hinduism and Ghandi's assassin; they're all kin. I very much agree with him in this respect, and I would add the Bernie Sanders phenomenon. My own point of view differs somewhat from Mishra’s, as does Gopnik’s, but I certainly appreciate everything Mishra has to say; I get his point of view. He really develops the question of why someone exposed to the West and enjoying and benefiting from its fruits would turn into a terrorist. Also, one of the book’s pleasures for me is the artful and comprehensive summaries and quotations of writings by the West’s and the Middle East’s and Asia’s foremost intellectuals in the past 300 years. In doing so, he draws fascinating connections between the Jacobins, 1940s central Europe, radical Islam, Brexit, radical Hinduism, the Christian Right, and Trump’s base.

It comes down to Voltaire vs. Rousseau. Personally, I very much favor Voltaire, but Rousseau emerges as kind of a sage who foresaw our age's torments better than anyone. The problem is partially about the unprecedented inequality created by capitalism, while modernism atomizes society and obliterations tribes, religions, founding myths, the environment, etc., leaving many lost and broken people in its wake. But there's also a pervasive, more subtle problem among even the seeming winners in modernity. Modernity, Mishra says, leads inevitably to more unhappiness, because our ever increasing wants inevitably outstrip whatever increased wellbeing comes with modernity's fruits. This may be capitalism's big flaw. I thought the arguments were terrifically well stated, and timely, though there's more to the story.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2...ide-of-history

[Jeff Lebowski]

I think I agree with creekster. At the same time, I think the science vs. religion forumulation misses the issue for other reasons. I recently read a terrrific book about this, "Age of Anger: A History of the Present," by Pankaj Mishra. The book provides a broad, comprehensive, interdisciplinary analysis of science vs. religion that I think is almost always lacking among Mormons and exmos of all kinds. The book was one of those books that altered my view; it did not change my values as to science vs. religion, but changed or broadened my perspective on the problem.

Raised and educated in India, Mishra is a scholar in English universities and overall gadfly. The New Yorker article I’ve linked by Adam Gopnik is helpful to read as an introduction to the book; I first learned about “Age of Anger” from the article, and Gopnik provides an in-depth, admiring critique of the book. The touchstone of this narrative is a powerful description of a friendship developed between Timothy McVeigh and Ramzi Yousef (he tried to blow up the WTC before 9/11) in the maximum security prison that housed them. If it's possible to shed sympathetic light on such people, Mishra does it. And he thinks they're cut from the same cloth. Radical Islam is not about Islam; it's about the same reaction to modernism that led to the Romantic Age, red state American religion, the Ku Klux Klan, Hitler, fascist Italy, Franco's Spain, Trump, Brexit, and radical contemporary Hinduism and Ghandi's assassin; they're all kin. I very much agree with him in this respect, and I would add the Bernie Sanders phenomenon. My own point of view differs somewhat from Mishra’s, as does Gopnik’s, but I certainly appreciate everything Mishra has to say; I get his point of view. He really develops the question of why someone exposed to the West and enjoying and benefiting from its fruits would turn into a terrorist. Also, one of the book’s pleasures for me is the artful and comprehensive summaries and quotations of writings by the West’s and the Middle East’s and Asia’s foremost intellectuals in the past 300 years. In doing so, he draws fascinating connections between the Jacobins, 1940s central Europe, radical Islam, Brexit, radical Hinduism, the Christian Right, and Trump’s base.

It comes down to Voltaire vs. Rousseau. Personally, I very much favor Voltaire, but Rousseau emerges as kind of a sage who foresaw our age's torments better than anyone. The problem is partially about the unprecedented inequality created by capitalism, while modernism atomizes society and obliterations tribes, religions, founding myths, the environment, etc., leaving many lost and broken people in its wake. But there's also a pervasive, more subtle problem among even the seeming winners in modernity. Modernity, Mishra says, leads inevitably to more unhappiness, because our ever increasing wants inevitably outstrip whatever increased wellbeing comes with modernity's fruits. This may be capitalism's big flaw. I thought the arguments were terrifically well stated, and timely, though there's more to the story.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2...ide-of-history

Sounds like an interesting book. Thanks.

[SeattleUte]

Also, for a conclusive case as to the overwhelming power of science to reveal ourselves to us, I strongly recommend this book, which I just finished.

https://www.amazon.com/Gene-Intimate.../dp/1476733503

Geneticists. Holy shit. I think they're the smartest people.

[creekster]

I think I agree with creekster. At the same time, I think the science vs. religion forumulation misses the issue for other reasons. I recently read a terrrific book about this, "Age of Anger: A History of the Present," by Pankaj Mishra. The book provides a broad, comprehensive, interdisciplinary analysis of science vs. religion that I think is almost always lacking among Mormons and exmos of all kinds. The book was one of those books that altered my view; it did not change my values as to science vs. religion, but changed or broadened my perspective on the problem.

Raised and educated in India, Mishra is a scholar in English universities and overall gadfly. The New Yorker article I’ve linked by Adam Gopnik is helpful to read as an introduction to the book; I first learned about “Age of Anger” from the article, and Gopnik provides an in-depth, admiring critique of the book. The touchstone of this narrative is a powerful description of a friendship developed between Timothy McVeigh and Ramzi Yousef (he tried to blow up the WTC before 9/11) in the maximum security prison that housed them. If it's possible to shed sympathetic light on such people, Mishra does it. And he thinks they're cut from the same cloth. Radical Islam is not about Islam; it's about the same reaction to modernism that led to the Romantic Age, red state American religion, the Ku Klux Klan, Hitler, fascist Italy, Franco's Spain, Trump, Brexit, and radical contemporary Hinduism and Ghandi's assassin; they're all kin. I very much agree with him in this respect, and I would add the Bernie Sanders phenomenon. My own point of view differs somewhat from Mishra’s, as does Gopnik’s, but I certainly appreciate everything Mishra has to say; I get his point of view. He really develops the question of why someone exposed to the West and enjoying and benefiting from its fruits would turn into a terrorist. Also, one of the book’s pleasures for me is the artful and comprehensive summaries and quotations of writings by the West’s and the Middle East’s and Asia’s foremost intellectuals in the past 300 years. In doing so, he draws fascinating connections between the Jacobins, 1940s central Europe, radical Islam, Brexit, radical Hinduism, the Christian Right, and Trump’s base.

It comes down to Voltaire vs. Rousseau. Personally, I very much favor Voltaire, but Rousseau emerges as kind of a sage who foresaw our age's torments better than anyone. The problem is partially about the unprecedented inequality created by capitalism, while modernism atomizes society and obliterations tribes, religions, founding myths, the environment, etc., leaving many lost and broken people in its wake. But there's also a pervasive, more subtle problem among even the seeming winners in modernity. Modernity, Mishra says, leads inevitably to more unhappiness, because our ever increasing wants inevitably outstrip whatever increased wellbeing comes with modernity's fruits. This may be capitalism's big flaw. I thought the arguments were terrifically well stated, and timely, though there's more to the story.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2...ide-of-history

The books sounds very good. The link, unfortunately, is broken for me.

[Jeff Lebowski]

The books sounds very good. The link, unfortunately, is broken for me.

That's odd. Works for me.

[creekster]

That's odd. Works for me.

oops. I take it back. It worked the third time.

[Topper]

I think I agree with creekster. At the same time, I think the science vs. religion forumulation misses the issue for other reasons. I recently read a terrrific book about this, "Age of Anger: A History of the Present," by Pankaj Mishra. The book provides a broad, comprehensive, interdisciplinary analysis of science vs. religion that I think is almost always lacking among Mormons and exmos of all kinds. The book was one of those books that altered my view; it did not change my values as to science vs. religion, but changed or broadened my perspective on the problem.

Raised and educated in India, Mishra is a scholar in English universities and overall gadfly. The New Yorker article I’ve linked by Adam Gopnik is helpful to read as an introduction to the book; I first learned about “Age of Anger” from the article, and Gopnik provides an in-depth, admiring critique of the book. The touchstone of this narrative is a powerful description of a friendship developed between Timothy McVeigh and Ramzi Yousef (he tried to blow up the WTC before 9/11) in the maximum security prison that housed them. If it's possible to shed sympathetic light on such people, Mishra does it. And he thinks they're cut from the same cloth. Radical Islam is not about Islam; it's about the same reaction to modernism that led to the Romantic Age, red state American religion, the Ku Klux Klan, Hitler, fascist Italy, Franco's Spain, Trump, Brexit, and radical contemporary Hinduism and Ghandi's assassin; they're all kin. I very much agree with him in this respect, and I would add the Bernie Sanders phenomenon. My own point of view differs somewhat from Mishra’s, as does Gopnik’s, but I certainly appreciate everything Mishra has to say; I get his point of view. He really develops the question of why someone exposed to the West and enjoying and benefiting from its fruits would turn into a terrorist. Also, one of the book’s pleasures for me is the artful and comprehensive summaries and quotations of writings by the West’s and the Middle East’s and Asia’s foremost intellectuals in the past 300 years. In doing so, he draws fascinating connections between the Jacobins, 1940s central Europe, radical Islam, Brexit, radical Hinduism, the Christian Right, and Trump’s base.

It comes down to Voltaire vs. Rousseau. Personally, I very much favor Voltaire, but Rousseau emerges as kind of a sage who foresaw our age's torments better than anyone. The problem is partially about the unprecedented inequality created by capitalism, while modernism atomizes society and obliterations tribes, religions, founding myths, the environment, etc., leaving many lost and broken people in its wake. But there's also a pervasive, more subtle problem among even the seeming winners in modernity. Modernity, Mishra says, leads inevitably to more unhappiness, because our ever increasing wants inevitably outstrip whatever increased wellbeing comes with modernity's fruits. This may be capitalism's big flaw. I thought the arguments were terrifically well stated, and timely, though there's more to the story.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2...ide-of-history

Excellent read, and thanks for the recommendations.

[SeattleUte]

Sapiens is another fine book that exposes the secularism or science vs. religion formulation as quaint and even foolish. (I'm a little late to the party, finally reading Sapiens, after it was an international bestseller for a long time, and receiving praise from Obama. It's the prequel to Homo Deus, about human future, which is also reviewed in the Gopnik article and has received a lot of publicity.) Sapiens contains the best explanation I've seen for why we say the Iliad was the seed of Ancient Greek civilization, Christianity was the fusion of ancient Greeek philosophy and the Torah, and Christianity begat Europe, and the mechanism for how that happened:

Legends, myths, gods and religions appeared for the first time with the Cognitive Revolution. Many animals and human species could previously say, ‘Careful! A lion!’ Thanks to the Cognitive Revolution, Homo sapiens acquired the ability to say, ‘The lion is the guardian spirit of our tribe.’ This ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of Sapiens language. It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven. But why is it important? After all, fiction can be dangerously misleading or distracting. People who go to the forest looking for fairies and unicorns would seem to have less chance of survival than people who go looking for mushrooms and deer. And if you spend hours praying to non-existing guardian spirits, aren’t you wasting precious time, time better spent foraging, fighting and fornicating? But fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively. We can weave common myths such as the biblical creation story, the Dreamtime myths of Aboriginal Australians, and the nationalist myths of modern states. Such myths give Sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers. Ants and bees can also work together in huge numbers, but they do so in a very rigid manner and only with close relatives. Wolves and chimpanzees cooperate far more flexibly than ants, but they can do so only with small numbers of other individuals that they know intimately. Sapiens can cooperate in extremely flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers. That’s why Sapiens rule the world, whereas ants eat our leftovers and chimps are locked up in zoos and research laboratories.

In this sense, Sapiens categorizes all "fictions" together, including religion, and abstractions such as corporations and human rights--enabling humans through their collective labors and talents to put themselves on the moon, fathom the gene code, create ICBMs, etc.

[CardiacCoug]

Sapiens was a good read. I agree.

The philosopher Louis CK said it best: Everything is amazing and yet nobody is happy.

Religion isn't the answer necessarily but robotic secularism isn't the answer either.

[Solon]

Sapiens is another fine book that exposes the secularism or science vs. religion formulation as quaint and even foolish. (I'm a little late to the party, finally reading Sapiens, after it was an international bestseller for a long time, and receiving praise from Obama. It's the prequel to Homo Deus, about human future, which is also reviewed in the Gopnik article and has received a lot of publicity.) Sapiens contains the best explanation I've seen for why we say the Iliad was the seed of Ancient Greek civilization, Christianity was the fusion of ancient Greeek philosophy and the Torah, and Christianity begat Europe, and the mechanism for how that happened:



In this sense, Sapiens categorizes all "fictions" together, including religion, and abstractions such as corporations and human rights--enabling humans through their collective labors and talents to put themselves on the moon, fathom the gene code, create ICBMs, etc.

I really liked Sapiens. ER Coug sent it to me (thanks!). It's a worthwhile exercise sometimes to look at sweeping changes over big swathes of time rather than narrowly focused historical questions.

One area that the book missed was the idea of reckoning time. IMO, the desire (need?) to keep track of time, and all that comes with it, from astronomy & astrology to tax records and harvest-seasons. The human ability to reckon time is a devilishly difficult idea to follow to its sources, but it seems to be extremely important in the creation of human societies.

[Jeff Lebowski]

I really liked Sapiens. ER Coug sent it to me (thanks!). It's a worthwhile exercise sometimes to look at sweeping changes over big swathes of time rather than narrowly focused historical questions.

One area that the book missed was the idea of reckoning time. IMO, the desire (need?) to keep track of time, and all that comes with it, from astronomy & astrology to tax records and harvest-seasons. The human ability to reckon time is a devilishly difficult idea to follow to its sources, but it seems to be extremely important in the creation of human societies.

There is a big section in The Discoverers by Daniel J Boorstein (former Librarian of Congress) that gives a fascinating history of the invention of time keeping and the impact it had on history. Love that book.

[SeattleUte]

I really liked Sapiens. It's a worthwhile exercise sometimes to look at sweeping changes over big swathes of time rather than narrowly focused historical questions.

What's key in such books, is how things are said, as much as what is said. Sapiens is a thinly disguised work of philosophy. As far as the big picture is concerned, I'm not really learning anything new. But it's still an immensely enjoyable and rewarding read. There are wonderful turns of phrase, such as where it posits that actually wheat domesticated humans. Also, I love books that formidably challenge the usual ways of seeing things. The book is mordantly funny in places. Sometimes it's a form of gallows humor. Sapiens is skeptical that the Cognitive Revolution, or the Agricultural Revolution were good things for any living thing. Humans and certainly the rest of the planet may have been better off had sapiens remained of no consequence as they have been for most of their history.

[Jeff Lebowski]

What's key in such books, is how things are said, as much as what is said. Sapiens is a thinly disguised work of philosophy. As far as the big picture is concerned, I'm not really learning anything new. But it's still an immensely enjoyable and rewarding read. There are wonderful turns of phrase, such as where it posits that actually wheat domesticated humans. Also, I love books that formidably challenge the usual ways of seeing things. The book is mordantly funny in places. Sometimes it's a form of gallows humor. Sapiens is skeptical that the Cognitive Revolution, or the Agricultural Revolution were good things for any living thing. Humans and certainly the rest of the planet may have been better off had sapiens remained of no consequence as they have been for most of their history.

Well, go ahead and stop thinking and start gathering your own nuts and seeds, smarty pants!

(looks great - on my reading queue)