Part 3 Live Blog: Postmodern Religion & the Faith of Social Justice

Here's the third instalment of my "live blog" of James Lindsay's Aero article, Postmodern Religion & the Faith of Social Justice

• Part 1
• Part 2

Pocket Epistemologies

I’m looking forward to this section. What is the epistemological justification for Social Justice religion, and how closely does it match religious epistemologies. 

James is definitely applying a Stephen Gould non-overlapping magisteria frame to things here. Based on his objective, I can see why he chose this. Personally, I'm not big on Gould's idea. As per Stuart Kauffman, I tend to be more pragmatic (in the technical sense) and see there being multiple espitemolgoical paths for different types of questions, none of which are ever completely pure.

James lays out pocket epistemologies as a method religionists use to justify dear moral preferenes/stances/ideologies. As per Haidt's motivated reasoning, desire precedes justification. Thus pocket epistemologies come after a desired moral solution space is occupied.

I think Lindsay overstates his case a bit here. Rationalization via pocket epistemologies may just be a case of pragmatically coming to the truth. But, that depends on how much of your core moral foundation you’re willing to erode. Hence the fundamental role analysis of sacred value protection plays in determining the extent to which something is or is not religious.

This is a good point, but I’m not sure one can conclude “chances are good it’s a faith-based project”. I really think you need a multi-factor behavioural dynamic approach for accurate religious characterizations. Of course that should intersect a bit with epistemological and reasoning methodologies. But I don’t think there is ever one “smoking gun” to be found in this game. Even subtle connotations of silver-bullet signals are, to me, counter-productive. This is especially valid in obviously contentious topic such as this one.

A Focus on the Unconscious

Perhaps James is going to get to an analysis of reasoning methods… ? I’m not sure how well one can see into people’s heads. But, perhaps I’m just underestimating what well-informed academics might know...

As an aside, I find it interesting how Jame’s comment here resonates with Canadian legal jurisprudence on the issue.

I like the definition James uses for "spiritual ". He basically defines it as morality with purpose. I’d suggest that the word purpose needs beefed up and refined, though. Perhaps it should relate strongly back to adaptive-group purposes which are fitness enhancing due to group cohesion effects and environmental niche construction effects. Maybe you can get by with just the environmental niche construction bit? Aren't group cohesion effects (within a loose sub-level of selection) just environmental niche constructions? While one doesn't have to think this way. One certainly can...

Looks like he got to the same spot I thought he needed to get to. 

I think James hits the nail on the head here. One of the more prominent (but not always necessary) factors of religion is a narrative that gives meaning to life. One caveat; Shamanism doesn’t give meaning to life per se. Rather it embodies people’s existential angsts. Thus is it meaning making or angst embodiment?

Shamanism doesn’t have to give people purpose. it just has to alleviate existential stress by helping people with awareness or catharsis. For instance does cognitive therapy provide meaning or does it just help people with personal issues?

I’m not sure I like Jame’s use of Haidt’s definition of divinity. It certainly makes some qualitative points. But just because people apply a term in a certain way does not mean it is applicable to the item under discussion. Thus labelling social justice elevation as “divine” co-opts religious language, but does so with only appeal-to-authority validity. I’d much rather see something more falsifiable. In that sense, the general idea of moral purpose elevation is correct, but it should be defended via multi-factor match-ups with religion more than by finding other academics who use religious labels for things.

But, I will concede, this is a good explanatory strategy for people who may be coming into this topic somewhat cold.

The “coolness” argument falls flat for me.

Ritual, Redemption, and Prayer

Funny to see social media posts analogized as prayer. I hadn’t thought of that before.

I guess the big question I have is, why are we matching religious phenomenon to things? Is it because these particular cultural solutions reflect similar underlying phenomenon? This analogous structure approach (whales have flippers, fish have fins), doesn’t reflect a common phylogenetic tree. Rather, it reflects common environmental landscape design constraints. 

This issue is important because Jame’s argument infers that, as a re-invention, social justice religion should reproduce analogous structures. The argument of social justice as a major evolutionary transition would posit homologous structures (with a very few major novel structures that have run-away via punctuated processes (rapid growth once divergence occurs)).

I don’t know how, in practice, one teases these things out. But it is interesting to see the progress in my thinking on this topic since the first post in this series. I guess there is a purpose to close reading responses…

I do like how James frames the protest-as-ritual problem. Protests become ritual once they lose their focus and become general events meant to unify participants rather than effect any pointed change or communicate any specific message. This is the best formulation of this equivalency that I’ve seen.

You still get left with the question of whether occupying space in order to show you have rights is or is not a ritual. For example, Proud Boys conduct some of their rallies to show that free speech isn’t dead, and that everyone has a right to walk and be together unmolested. In some ways these things have no point. It is sort of like a dog marking their territory. So, are these events generalized religious ritual, or a space marking game? 

For Proud Boys who are always under antifa attack, I’d say such "focusless" events are more space marking than ritual. For social justice activists who don’t get attacked and confronted when they rally, I’d say such "focusless" events are less space marking and more ritual.

Gender Nuns and the Grand Wizards of the Diversity Board

Who cares about content. This is just a wonderful title!

In terms of content for this section, I suspect a framing of complicated language in terms of slightly counter-intuitive belief optimization would have been more rigorous. Religions tend to maximize memetic fitness at the expense of factual validity. Of course you need to caveat this a bit. Immediate factual validity isn’t tossed out willy-nilly. It is replaced by meta-narrative validity; lessons that matter on long time frames and which derive value from continual intersection. Of course, sometimes the factual accuracy part just gets replaced by supernaturalism which, strictly speaking, is not necessary for narrative lessons. But, it is useful for Big Brother comprehension and respect….

Don’t underestimate the utility and optimization of religion….

The End

Part 2 Live Blog: Postmodern Religion & the Faith of Social Justice

Social Justice Institutionalized

This should be an interesting topic. I suspect James will try to show how University Critical Theory departments and Diversity offices supply the hierarchical web necessary for 

• coherent sect replication
• authorized hierarchal imprimatur
• base level indoctrination and proselytization.

Guess we’ll see. I’m looking forward to be surprised. I have a feeling James may have some novel takes here….

I really liked the way James framed these first few sentences. In evolutionary lingo, organizational structure is niche construction. It is what adaptive groups do to tweak their environment so it is appropriately fitness enhancing. Adjusting the environment too much may be not worth the effort and hence counter productive. Bar-yam’s simulations on virus virility fit in nicely here.

One question this raises for me is, do religions, like viruses, have bounds for how much environmental manipulation is too little and how much is too much? Virility quotients probably only make sense in terms of long-term stability patterns. And, even then, pragmatics and Bar-Yam’s simulation both show periodic break-offs to high/low virile probes. As a new religious movement, Social Justice may be going down the cultish path of virile overshoot. But, if it is a long term social structure, chances are its just turning the corner on its cultish growth phase. If so, you’d expect to seem some fairly predictable changes in how it propagates.

One change I’d expect is more reliance on organizational structures. However, Social Justice as a religious evolutionary transition may do something radical here. I’d also expect more word of mouth propagation and expansion via physical segregation (i.e. majority SJW communities).

I think I’ve already mentioned how the intertwining between religion and governance is fairly foundational to their adaptiveness. The ability of a religion to grab state power is usually an extremely fit memetic solution. Think of how the Christian meme cluster benefitted from Constatine’s endorsement. Or think of how medieval Christianity fared when it co-opted European chiefdom governance controls.

Many people’s worry about social justice is precisely how new moral criminal law is functionally out of public control and firmly in the power of social justice religious ardents. I know my critiques back in the late 90’s were precisely about this possibility. Obviously these critiques were fully marginalized as slippery slope fallacies. It is interesting to see them come to fruition. It is more interesting yet to see just how far they can go. I expect they will go very far.

For instance, I very much doubt religions who pay priests for services will be able to discriminate in their hiring on any behaviour (like sexual mores) which touches any protected class status. For instance, I strongly suspect that in a decade or two you’ll see gender based priesthood exclusions challenged under human right codes. In Canada at least, these codes are very clear about which side the law is on. Similarly teachings that promote “traditional gender roles” is likely to be another hill upon which things will break. Expect selective prosecution to save minority’s from being challenged for their equivalent discriminatory practices. Thus, I think James’ point about tolitalitarian tendencies is very apt. How many religions that have co-opted state control have tended to pluralistic practice?

Again, I think this is an excellent point. I love how well Jame’s argument about the epistemological parallels between Social Justice religion and religion come back around to re-enforce his worries about university take over.  Universities are the meme’s main propagation and validation tool. To appropriate Dawkin’s viral interpretation of religion, it is as if the social justice religion virus has found the perfect host replicator. Not only does it propagate. It stamps an imprimatur of authority and validation. You couldn’t ask for more!

And, this gets back to the point I’m most interested in - is social justice religion a re-invention or a major evolutionary transition?  Did it stumble upon University as a replicator by random Darwinian processes (exploration of the adjacent possible), or did this landscape serve as part of the paradigm in which novel memes-clusters emerged and were winnowed out?

Another great quote. No commentary needed.

The Scholarly Canon

I’m expecting a bit of an overextension here. Guess we’ll see…

Having read this section, I’m glad James didn’t engage with the metaphorical / narrative truth claims now popular via Jordan Peterson. It would have been a pointless target. I’m a little surprised he didn’t delve into the self-referential citations circles that end up reproducing appeal-to-authority dynamics and virtue-based job progression (ie. the most “righteous” move from priest to bishop to cardinal). I think that would have been needless inflammatory. Glad he committed it.

Faith in Social Justice

From the title of the article, this should be the heart of the argument. I’m interested. I wouldn’t have considered faith the point around which I would centre my argument. That’s why it is always nice to listen to what other people say.

Just wondering how you would falsify this idea of faith. Could a transactional business that don’t leverage moral values “look to the assurance of things hoped for”? Perhaps the answer is only no if we define “hoped for” in terms of some moral outcome. But how do you tease an outcome which is moral from one which is not? That’s not very easy. It seems to revolve around intentions about the betterment of people ideological choices and intentions. “We want them to think better” (i.e. more morally correctly).

The Mythological Core of Applied Postmodernism

The idea that social justice isn’t just a couple of isolated memes, but rather a fairly coherent narrative is interesting. Most academic theories are not narrative in nature. Getting a good narrative that resonates with psychological cognitive wells is a strong sign that you’ve got something more than an academic theory. Again, I’d tend to look for Atran’s behavioural descriptors to assess the degree to which things are or are not religious. Jordan Peterson’s work is generally informative here (not in a prescriptive way, but more in a “get up to speed” in case you’ve missed out on being in the middle of non-simplistic religious theology).

Again, the parallel matching done in this section is probably useful for a general audience. I’d be more interested and moved by a falsifiable narrative feature analysis…. Religious stories fit a certain range of unbelievability within the slightly-counter-intuitive belief spectrum. You don’t need supernaturalism. You need memorability and a perception of layers of unending depth. Post-modernism gives that to you. The intersectional application reduces the level of unbelievability. And, I suspect, helps the narrative structure resonate at the right level of counter-intuitiveness / quasi-factuality.

It’s hard to judge if the result is any more or any less quasi-factual than most materialistically biased forms of supernaturalism. I would say, in terms of modern contexts, the unbelievability level is about equal. It’s just that now days, anything supernatural is automatically viewed as exceptional unbelievable. But a couple of hundred years ago, I’d suggest the level of unbelievability by a lay person would be about as similar as the level of unbelievability post modernism and intersectionality are to modern laity. But, again, this is hard to judge.

What does seem clear though, is that social justice religion is not shooting for believability within a supernatural paradigm or set of supernaturalistic believers. It is a re-invention for a set of secularists.

I’d also add that it appears that a number of radical social justice advocates come across as somewhat “flaky”. By that I mean that they more be more akin to flighty drama major that hard-nosed grounded engineers. Additionally the social supports many require hint at higher levels of neuroses and mental health issues, at least in some sub-set populations. Now this may simply be an artefact of groupings. But, it is certain that some of the sub-groups affiliated with these movements clearly have statistically above average risk factors. That is after all, part of why they are fighting for social justice! Our systems are structurally unfair as evidenced by disproportionate mental trauma rates…

Religion-Governance Inter-evolution: Social Justice as a Major Religious Evolutionary Transition

Image from http://www.religionandsociety.org.uk/

Does the new wave of quasi-legally enforced social justice "woke-ism"represent a major evolutionary transition in religion and governance?

After going over some previous major evolutionary transitions, I'll suggest that it is certainly possible. Our current Great Moral Awakening, may reflect something much bigger than another turn on our normal 50 year socio-political instability cycle.

BACKGROUND

Researchers like Ara Norezayan have published plausible evidence about the co-evolution of religion and societal governance via long-term pacing and leading cycles. Religion comes up with a cultural innovation facilitated by the landscape changes produced by governance. Religion's resultant landscape changes then prime things for governance innovations and evolutions. The two iterate.

Change occurs culturally, but is primed, fertilized and stabilized due to gene-cultural trait selection.  Thus, processes aren't purely cultural. Rather, genetic factors (which likely facilitate or stabilize certain cultural traits) are important, ne essential.

The easiest way to conceptualize this is via domestication processes. Domestication is a gene-cultural process. People, like other animals, are clearly domesticable. You just need a selection process. War and differential fitness (via most any selection process) work quite well here. Multi-level selection theory, while not required, helps endogenize this process with respect to human groups / social structures.

HISTORICAL EXAMPLES

Toblecki Temple

Peter Turchin

The archeological record from Toblecki temple suggests a significant social change somewhere around 10,000 years ago. This is generally interpreted as a religious gathering that suppressed conflict to enable beyond-tribal level gatherings. Religious studies folk generally interpret this as a signal for the move away from implicit religion, which is non-separable from tribal culture, to explicit religion, which is distinguishable from tribal culture. In effect, this reflects an inflection point where religion became a distinguishable performance or constrainable set of beliefs or practices.

According to Norezayan and others, this also reflects a change-point where chiefdom sized governance strategies were finally able to fully emerge.

God-Kings

You see the initiation of another major evolutionary transition point during the emergence of god-king governance. Typically chiefdoms temporarily aligned together during times of existential crises via distinct religious and war/political leaders. Separation of powers weakened the risks of authoritarian usurpation. As Norezayan says, sometime the religious leader or war leader was killed (or you had one person doing both roles for whatever reason) and the mantle of both roles fell on one. Then it is reasonable to assume that sometimes an attempt would have been made to stabilize that power and large group control. But, with a small population, it is hard to provide sufficient protection for the usurper. Round the clock bodyguards manned by kin relations are likely insufficiently numerous to stave off assassination. However, as society size increases, king-guard size may prove sufficient. The organizational requirements for an effective coup are sized large enough to be politically detectable.

Egypt (among other states) revealed one solution, god-king ideology. However, while this solution slightly extended the time frame before assassination, a religious-governance solution seemed to be what really stabilized things.

A moral solution which normed leaders to give back to the people solved stability issues. For instance, if a god-king could save enough grain to get through the area's periodic droughts, then the state was well situated to survive over an extended period of time.

I tend to think of religion as providing the moral force (and believable-enough promises) necessary to prevent catastrophic leader gaming of resource extraction for vainglorious rather than pro-social ends. Thus the god-king transition is an example of a governance transition which appropriated religious landscape resources/innovations.

Universalizing Religion

I usually cite Cyrus the Great (~500BCE) as one of the first examples of state-level religious pluralism facilitation. Religious pluralism was a governance intervention that facilitated various gene-cultural landscape changes out of which universalizing religion was eventually able to emerge.

Universalizing religions can be seen as a major (cultural) evolutionary transition. The firm belief that a given set of ideologies and ideological based practices were universally useful for different cultures, without having to totally reform said cultures, was a major innovation. Not only were religion and culture largely separable (to a degree at least), religion was a unifying force. A landscape was produced in which elevated levels of proselytization addressed some governance goals. Religion and governance intertwined.


Monotheism
I've skipped over the evolutionary transition to mono-theism. I don't think its importance should be minimized. But, I just don't think I need to say much about it. I'd probably class it as a moderate rather than a major transition. Plus, inferences in how it may have affected governance is much more conjectural than other phase changes.


Protestantism
In terms of western religious tradition, the emergence of Protestantism in the era of Luther represents what I'd call a moderate or perhaps even minor evolutionary transition. Transition was from a centralized, highly hierarchical religion, to a less centralized, less hierarchical religion. Great Religious Awakening cycles further decentralization.

Our latest Great Religious Awakening, characterized by "social justice", reflects not just another decentralization shuffling, but, likely, a full religious evolutionary transition.



WHY SOCIAL JUSTICE is a (RELIGIOUS) EVOLUTIONARY TRANSITION

Religion has been traditionally associated with supernaturalism. Moral Big Brothers reflect an ability to

• punish immoral behaviour, even if not caught in the present,
• adjudicate what is and isn't moral behaviour,
• reward good behaviour.
• see into people's minds to judge intent,
• etc.

Scott Atran in "In God's We Trust" lays out an exceptionally strong exposition of the evolutionary utility of these and other religiously associated behaviours.

The rise of atheism and its likely minimal immediate effects of social cohesion capital suggest many people now have gene-cultural traits different from the past. I doubt 200 years ago an atheistic society would have survived. Whether or not this would have been because of intra-group collapse or inter-group competition is interesting but tangential.  Strong supernaturalism is now, increasingly superfluous to adaptive group formation and stabilization, provided it is compensated by other adaptive group factors (however, no formal work has been done on this that I know of - so consider such speculation common sense)

Sects of social justice are well-considered behaviourally similar to religion*. James Lindsay's newest work adds to this body of work. The major differences between social justice quasi-religion and traditional religion is the minimization or elimination of supernaturalism. When you look at other moral-groups which are also adaptive (from an evolutionary sense) you tend to find the following factors minimized or eliminated, and the following factors kept:**

• 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)

Social justice hits many religious factors. Major differences are

• supernaturalism
• radical decentralization which nonetheless re-invents identity-based groupings.

James Lindsay takes the position that these differences reflect the idea that the phenomenon of religion has been re-invented in a modern secular paradigm without any appeal to or connection to religion. I largely agree. However, I think gene-cultural reasoning suggests what we might actually be seeing is another pacing-and-leading between religion and governance facilitated by gene-culture landscape changes produced by religion and governance. In effect, "social justice" is built on a series of cultural innovations that make it seem like it is a complete re-invention. Why? Because it is ridiculous to think "social justice" was picking and choosing religious modules to replace and supplant. Solutions may certainly have been influenced by ingrained gene-culture wells (aka darwin machines or cognitive dispositions). But the formation of the social justice dynamical solution space was clean. Thus influences are probably;

• gene-cultural,



spear head "phylogenetics"

• and implicit, not overt.

It is the lack of continuity with past religion that I think marks radical social justice activist sects as a likely major evolutionary transition in religion. The way it intertwines with governance means it is very likely to produce some major, long lasting effects. This isn't just a one-off blip like the Roman-Orthodox split, or the slow rise of Mormonism as a new world religion. This is BIG. This interacts with governance in some very new and some potentially very disturbing ways (or very productive ways - depending upon your ideology).






CAVEATS
One thing to remember is that new religious movements have a very poor track record at long-term survivability. How many religions were formed during the Great Religious Awakening of the 1820's-1840's? How many of those are around today?

Just because radical social justice activist groups have a pretty good potential to grow, expand and change the governance and religion landscape, does not mean that it will.

Social justice is starting to experience severe blow back in areas like free speech, open borders, ever expanding positive-styled human rights. As Steve Bannon is found of saying, the push back against globalist agendas is happening on both the "left" and the "right". From the left via economic nationalism. And, on the right via ethno / cultural or patriotic nationalism. Pervasive retrenchment away from globalism and back to strong nationalism may cripple social-justice-as-religion growth.

Chances are, it won't. But one never knows.

Similarly, social-justice-as-religion may simply de-virulize.  There are lots of different sects  of social justice. Puritanism, functional Ludditists, evangelicals (strong proselytizers), millennial-esque utopians, authoritarian governance strains, etc). It is not certain what competition between these groups may produce.

But, no matter what, things are interesting!

________________________
Notes
* some extra reference on behaviour and dynamical approaches to religious definition

• 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

** these factors come out of Scott Atran's "In Gods we Trust" excellent evolutionary psychology work. Arran doesn't explicitly make this list, but they're pretty easy to gather and categorize, even without a close reading.

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.

Harris - Peterson 4 - part 2 "Live Blog"

47:45

Harris and Peterson agree that we can’t always solve utilitarian calculations over multiple time periods. Harris says we are certainly getting better. Peterson agrees, but suggests fundamental evolutionary based ethics do better.

I think Stuart Kauffman’s “Reinventing The Sacred” does a really good job teasing out how cold rationality fares in complex forward predictions compared to informed intuition. Kauffman suggests that our faith in rationality is mainly backward looking. It rarely does well with Black Swan events. It just looks really good in hind sight.

This is a fairly powerful argument. I suspect Harris would dismiss it by rationalism’s 1% improve rate compounded into the future.

48:00 - 48:40

Nice to see Harris saying that moral messages may best be conveyed by story rather than scientific papers.  This seems like a winning position.  I’m not sure Peterson would disagree. He would probably say that those stories are likely to become optimized with archetypical forms whose moral lessons are tied to evolutionarily selected pro-social ethics.

51:00

Peterson gets back to the danger of atheism leaving nothing to fill an ethical and social coherence role.

I think Harris would agree. We’ll soon see. I think Harris acknowledges the need for a moral ethic. He just thinks it shouldn’t be based in supernaturalism. In effect you have a non-supernatural, humanist fact based United Church.

52:40

Murray made an excellent point with respect to Nietzsche. If you remove the religious substructure, or even just parts of it, you may end up with no redemptive narrative or vehicle. This may result in overwhelming guilt build up which can’t be assuaged.

I’d note the current build up of white guilt and privilege seems spot on here. However, I would be very surprised if a more formalized redemptive narrative doesn’t soon come in to fill this gap. Right now it is still a nascent “grace” based form. You just need to admit your privilege and then start giving things up. This is obviously problematic. It is not sustainable because there are no limits to what should be given up. Thus, for me, it comes across as very cult-like.  There is nothing wrong with that per se. Most new religious movements start off as cults. They then navigate a socio-cultural fitness landscape and either stumble into some combination of heuristics that work or they die. There seem to be a few obvious ways confessional progressivism can go to keep things sustainable. Whether or not it takes one of those paths, innovating through combinatorics and novelty, is of course any one’s guess.

53:00

Peterson and Murray are hammering home the  critique of motivational force in rationalism/atheism.  As Murray says, atheists aren’t lining up for weekly Stoicism readings.

This seems like a cheap shot. But, it is also somewhat accurate. The cheapness is that as per the debate audience - people do line up to discuss things somewhat regularly. The critique is that the regularity is insufficient for societal coherence. Things are just too spread out.

57:00

Peterson - “if we can’t move into the realm of deep discussions about good and evil then we can’t reach the level necessary to help people who have been touched by malevolence.”

This might be true, but I think Harris’ point stands - you can get lots of depth out of non-supernatural understandings of human nature which also include heroism and depravity. Why do you need a story and supernaturalism? I think the rejoinder is so that people believe they can leave their funk even if they think they can’t. They have to believe in the impossible. Saying you can do it. It is rational to think so, may not have the saving force necessary to motivate. Quasi-factuality may be needed.

I think this is a very significant point. I hope they stick on this one, or that Murray holds their feet to it. I would like to hear his view too.

1:09:00

I really like the current discussion about inspiration’s role in the bible and other books. Mormonism has certainly dealt with this much more than any other religion. The general answer from this tradition is fairly close to what Peterson says. “Divine” inspiration is a process greatly influenced by the person recording and experiencing it. It also involves a sense of coherence with deep societal values and needs. Peterson would certainly say this is the Logos of our evolutionary roots being expressed. I would tend to agree. At certain times, inspiration seems to find great coherence with some very fundamental human moral issues and lessons. The accuracy of this coherence certainly can be questioned. Sometimes what felt right is out of whack from rationalistic ethics. But, I would wager a guess that, on average, it is probably fairly expressive of the existential concerns of a group - provided of course that the individual conduit has a significantly deep history of trying and succeeding in a lifelong experience of attenuating to the group’s moral and existential needs.

In effect “revelation” is often a licensed expression of group morality and moral needs. Can individuals game this? Certainly. Tammy Fay Baker and all the other televangelists certainly do. Do all the “shamans” of a group or their “prophets” game things? It is certainly possible. But it is also possible that there are significant filtering processes for religious leaders in terms of their pro-sociality. Many people might think leaders are bedevilled and are simply grafting. For instance, the Shaw of Iran may be interpreted as corrupt and destroying his society. That is a very valid point. It is also likely that despite the corruption and other things that he is actually interested in the existential survival of his people.

Which one dominates? Over time, systems almost always corrupt. I think this rather complicated and long post summarizes how things are apt to work

http://largegroupdynamic.blogspot.com/2016/08/educations-unintentional-structural.html

1:10:20

Peterson’s point about a hierarchy of revelation (wisdom) is a very hard point to argue against. I’m not sure how Harris will respond? Has he ever encountered anyone well versed in modern revelation with respect to scripture (not just new age like revelation/intuition)? I’m not sure. I guess we’ll see.

1:10:40

Harris makes the point that all these scriptural revelations are simply things done by people. This leads to an obvious rejoinder - “what would you call the best moral exposition done”? Scripture? What would you call the best possible exposition?

This of course fails if one believes God to be a perfect being (in absolute terms). But what if God is simply representative of the best, or near best that can be done in a given context?

This is certainly within the scope of Mormon’s rather materialisitc perspective of Deity. In that view perfection is always getting better because both the environment and individuals are growing in capacity. It is interesting to see that Peterson has likely recreated this position. I think Harris is still hung up on absolutes though…

1:19:00

I love Murray’s answer here. We are currently creating a whole new set of religions that are reinventing all sort of heresies. They are not yet drawing blood, but it is very easy to imagine them taking a path whereby they do. I’ve been saying this for years. Social progressivist and fundamentalist politics are de facto religions or quasi-religions. They just lack supernaturalism. But they are just as quasi-factual or a-factual - at least in many areas.

1:28:00

Harris is again going back to the argument that religions have irreconcilable belief differences and therefor we can’t have a multi-path approach to the “truth”. I can see what Peterson is getting pretty frustrated at this. He says “then try Buddhism Sam.”. I don’t see why you can’t have different paths. This is a pluralistic, multi-cultural approach. Each group can deeply believe in at the utility of their own traditions. Accept that other things work for other people, for a variety of reasons. Then you’ll probably find out that where people overlap is in the deepest aspects of pro-sociality. You wouldn’t expect the Dali Lama and the Pope to get in a fist fight. They are probably both really pro-social people who would love each other’s company I think Harris may be too caught up in history here. People’s gene-culture evolution to pluralism continues to increase. Religious pluralism is more and more likely People can be subsumed by emergent pro-social essences while still expressing different story based expressions.

Perhaps that is why Harris’ hyper-rationalism has always felt a bit scary and tolitalitarian in potential. It seems to allow minimal expressional difference. Two stories with different surface ideas that different people can take to support mutually incompatible ideas is a real threat to Harris. It just doesn’t mesh with hyper-rationalist book keeping. And yet in practice, the degree of error probably isn’t that big a deal. It is the deeper stuff that matters. Over time religions seem to be tending toward more and more focus on this deeper stuff, while the superficial trappings are more like individual’s tattoo’s. They are more about colour than incompatibility.

1:35:30

The guests make a distinction that the pursuit of truth and the pursuit of tolerance are not the same thing. To me this is an essential point. Harris seems to think the pursuit of truth will lead to better outcomes than the pursuit of tolerance. Peterson and Murray seem to take the opposite position.

This is where I think Peterson’s 20th century genocidal worries really seem to provide some power. It is easy to go wrong when you put pressure on groups to pursue truth. It is harder to go wrong when you try to pursue tolerance. Of course both positions need some boundaries and tensions to work. Thus, Im quite happy including Harris’ hyper-rationalism as part of pluralistic endeavour to better humanity. It is, in effect, another belief system that works for a certain percentage of the population. Just let others believe differently, and focus on people’s and group’s pro-sociality much more than the specific strokes in their story expressions. 

1:37:55

Murray says that the worry is that the roots of the enlightenment seem not to have gone very far and very deep.  I would fully agree with this. We are dealing with gene-culture traits that take a long time to stabilize and a long-time to change. Going too fast is reckless. That doesn’t mean certain groups can’t go faster than others. Just don’t assume everyone is like you. Hence the importance of humility stories - say like those in most religious traditions…..