Part 1 Live Blog: Postmodern Religion & the Faith of Social Justice

James Lindsay's original Aero article is here

https://areomagazine.com/2018/12/18/postmodern-religion-and-the-faith-of-social-justice/

Caveats

This is not an analytical review of this work. Rather, it is a running commentary based on a first reading of it.

Why?

Sometimes it is more fun to engage substantive ideas in a piece meal fashion. Why? It gives you a chance to predict what will happen. Are you on the same page as the author? Do they predict what you think the major issues are? Do they take you some place un-expected? That possibility is probably more exciting than anything.

How to Play Along

Based upon the form of this work, I’ll probably try to check in every chapter. When I check in more frequently, I’ll try and screen capture my points of engagement and tangential departures. When you see a stop point, try to think how you’d respond to things up to this point were you in a face-to-face conversation with the author. My commentary will be just like a second commentator on the stage. And, like many debates, it will have about as much effect on the content I’m engaging with… :)

Major Background Works for Things to Probably Make Sense

• Scott Atran’s In God’s We Trust
• Are Norezayan’s Big Gods
• D.S. Wilson’s Darwin’s Cathedrals
• Jonathan Haidt’s Why Good People are Divided by Religion and Politics
• Jordan Peterson stuff
• Patheos blog - Are your political beliefs religion
• Atran’s For Cause and Comrades devoted actors paper
• Sternly’s Religion Re-explained paper
• Alcorta’s and Sosis’ paper on The Evolution of Religion as an Adaptive Complex (a four factor model)
• Turnbull’s paper on Quasi-religious experiences in corporate change programs
• Franks et al paper on Conspiracy theories as quasi-religious mentality
• Piper and Sosis’ Moral Intuitions and the Religious System paper
• Singh’s paper on the Cultural Evolution of Shamanism - more relevant than you’d think!
• Upal’s Simulating the Emergence of New Religious Movements - more a mind opener than a solid technical work
• Boyer’s paper on the Cultural Evolution of Ritualized Behaviour

Table Of Contents

Looking at the table of contents, I’m guessing James is going to take a phenomenon matching approach. By that I mean it looks like he is going to match up major religious phenomenon to Social Justice

• faith
• quasi-factuals (minimally counter-intuitive beliefs)
• appeal to authority
• blasphemy
• clean hands, etc. 

It does not look like he is going to use an established metric which defines religion and then see to what extent radical social justice activist groups fit this definition. 

While I prefer the latter approach, I’m not sure picking and choosing definitions to match is as rigorous as one might think. Most definitions haven’t been tested experimentally (what percentage of of things most people see as religions does definition X capture or miss). Personally, I’d just stick with Scott Atran’s multi-factored behavioural analysis of religion and go from there. Too bad Atran moved onto other fields and no one (that I know of) did experimental tests of his factors to see how accurately they capture quasi-religions. Eventually the Science of Religion folks are going to have to address false positive, false negative definitional matches. I think the only way to do this is via psychological / adaptive group approaches, like Atran’s.

Social Justice and Religion

Looks like, I might be right - James is defining Social Justice right off the bat. This looks to be setting up an ideology matching game.

But then again, maybe I’m wrong…

It seems like James may be focussing on epistemological issues. I guess in some sense that is phenomenological… but looks like my initial guess is a bit off.  Things are going to be more nuanced than most popular SJW=religion takes. Happy to be surprised….and to be wrong. I always like being wrong. It means I’m learning something!

I really like how James has distanced himself from Sullivan’s rather hackish job on SJ=religion. While I certainly take the view that radical social justice activist groups are a replacement for religion, I like the nuance that comes from Jame’s approach of seeing it as a redevelopment of religion emerging from a modern secular paradigm. In this light, my old comments (and all but finished blog post), on Social Justice as a major evolutionary transition in religion, is relevant. If Social Justice is a modern secular re-invention of religion, it is likely to come across as a major evolutionary transition when viewed phylogenetically. I don’t think it really matters which perspective is “right”. Differences like that are fairly semantic and have more to do with the questions one is trying to answer than with “un-mutable” fact.

Again, I think James’ point is a very important one. Social Justice is not people trying to reproduce religion. It is a much bigger change than this. It is not a sect / break-off from supernaturally weak humanistic religion (like watered down Unitarianism). It is not a modular replacement of religious memes (take away original sin, add privilege). He seems to be proposing that it is a ground-up total re-invention of what religion looks like when coming out of a secular environment. It need have absolutely no connections to religion or any religious tradition.

I’d of course disagree. I think the position he puts forward is argumentatively clean. It pre-supposes no connection to religion. Therefore the argument is contingent upon nothing “religious”. This is rhetorically smart. I’d simply suggest the chances of this phenomenon not being culturally informed by examples of religion is small. This does not mean there are direct transfers from religion to Social Justice. That is rather asinine. Rather, it means when Social Justice activists think about how to solve a problem or where to take a given ideology, their cognitive wells (evolutionary Darwin machines) interact with the classes of solutions that can come to mind due to experience and awareness. Therefore certain “religious” solutions and approaches have an easier time getting appropriated in what the person would see as a clean, unbiased “re-invention”.

Again, I see the major evolutionary phase changes in religion, such as the move to universalizing religion, or culture-religion separation as being analogous. The degree of change is so large that they very well could have come from total re-invention.  Was Christianity an evolution of Judaism? We now look back and see it as such. Some of the New Testament books written well after the fact, certainly portray it as such. But, during the historical Jesus’ time was the Gospel emergent from him experienced more like a continuation of (a new prophetic call within) Judaism, or more like a total re-invention of religion from his time period? One will never know…

Ideologically Motivated Moral Communities

I had to smile as I read this. This is exactly where adaptive groups (from D.S. Wilson’s evolutionary biology) come in. Moral communities who also happen to function as adaptive groups, tend to have characteristics which match up with what is likely to sustain altruistic benefits exchanges.

I think James gets to this point with his “ideologically motivated moral communities”. I just think the multi-level selection approach by Wilson makes for a firmer foundation. Although I will acknowledge that from a rhetorical perspective, James would likely have to fight some easy-to-fling strawmen should he even broach the group-selection bogey-man.

In a more rigorous academic paper, I suspect James would get some additional traction if he laid out a few more factors beside sacred values that usually occur in adaptive groups. Unfortunately no one has really combined Scott Atran and D.S. Wilson. Guess that’s a gap in the literature waiting to be filled…

Basically what I’ve been informally doing is taking Atran’s behavioural factors and looking at adaptive moderately moral groups which are clearly not religious and seeing which of Atran’s pieces tend to be minimized. Here’s roughly what you get:

• Big Brothers
• Supernaturalism (minimized or eliminated)
• strong norm enforcement
• steep in-group out group-gradients (moderated)
• sacred values (moderated)
• clean hands / purity (minimized or eliminated)
• ritual
• counter-intuitions / quasi-factuals (minimized)
• costly commitments (moderated)

I think the ability to falsify Social Justice as religion is essential. I’m not sure Jame’s paper is laid out this way. I suspect the mob will pick up on this. Flinging the “hypocrite” label is likely to be a temptation many will be unable to resist. That’s unfortunate. But, as I’m reading this article, I’m definitely looking for purposefully included falsifiability tests…

Religion Meets Needs

Again, I think James does a solid job here. Arguably he could have leveraged D.S. Wilson’s fitness based approach to religion rather than a psychological needs based approach. But, I think both approaches get a general audience to the same spot. Precision is nice, but is not always warranted. Obviously I’m partial to the adaptive group explanations… they seem really grounded.

Reading another paragraph ahead, I’m a bit more worried about framing things in terms of “needs” (presumably via The Psychology of Religion apparent approach (which I haven’t read)). My main concern is that this enables superficial rapproaches that the group under discussion has no such “need”. Thus my fear is that the word “need” will be understood colloquially rather than technically (as per the psychological literature). I think Wilson’s evolutionary biology avoids this.