Short Thoughts On Belief
In recent weeks I have been thinking about what believe meaning to be and how we might find it in the rapidly moving landscape of civilisation at the moment - I wanted to share my thoughts here for you to evaluate.
The first point asserted by many is that as identity politics has become fashionable, we need to move our focus away from tribal thinking and towards reason and rationality. Usually presented as something along the lines of universal rationalism, this belief identifies the cause of identity politics as a reprise of religious dogmatism.
Let me begin by stating that I agree with this sentiment; however, this is a far more nuanced issue than at first glance and therefore, I see a different pathway before us in conclusion. I would argue that the current impulse towards identity politics is due to a fractionated belief system arising from a lack of belief at the outset. The woke culture we see today, although followers would reject this proposition, believing they are virtuous and morally superior beings who disregard religion, attempts to cobble together a primitive religious system out of perceived injustices in our society. You can see why many are rejecting religious belief systems entirely, trying to move towards a universally objective belief system instead. This view is partially correct but insufficient, let me explain why.
It appears to me that liberal beliefs are declining because the individualist nucleus of the philosophy now sees commitment to a higher being as a fictitious and irrelevant exercise. We instead tell ourselves that happiness is the meaning of life; a shallow proposition that has not stood the test of time. As incredibly valuable as they are, the values that arose from the enlightenment period in Europe beginning in the 17th century have not travelled terribly wide or profoundly deep across the globe. Furthermore, enlightenment values are partially responsible for creating the void currently inhabited by our senseless fixation on identity politics. We need to integrate the enlightenment values into a shared and familiar vision of higher purpose so that people with opposing viewpoints are not torn apart by the current cultural climate.
To start, I struggle to see how we move away from these religious structures, both consciously and subconsciously. Our conscious apprehension may well reject the notion of religion, many do, but hidden beyond that is a leviathan of subconsciousness and unconscious thought that appear to me to hunger for something approximate to a religious substructure. At the very least, it seems to indicate a desire for a deep narrative that justifies our existence, which is not something to dismiss lightly. Why are the most successful fictions of our time based on evidently ludicrous stories of heroes utilising supernatural powers to defeat the underlying evil nature of the world around them? Disney fairytales. Harry Potter. Star Wars. The Lord of the Rings. Marvel and DC Comics. The list goes on.
In a purely rational world, we would dismiss these stories as nonsense that provides little utility in our day to day lives. Yet, these stories swirl around the minds of millions of people around the world from different cultures and backgrounds. The most profound of narratives endure across every possible circumstance of human behaviour and therefore hold within them a deeper form of truth than objective reality despite these stories being works of fiction. You could conclude that these stories are universally accessible and more adaptive due to their fictional nature but also more durable - the great stories of our times outlast many scientific discoveries. Quite often, these stories take the form of archetypal representations of a supernatural phenomenon, like Thor in the Marvel films, named after the Norse god of thunder and lightning and the origin of Thursday as a day of the week - quite literally Thor's day. Does all of this sound familiar? These stories have millions of devoted fans attending yearly conventions to understand, explore and expand these stories further - usually through such mediums as fan fiction. The most enthusiastic of fans dress up as their favourite character from these stories and derive an intricately woven narrative from the film, books or comics they love. They physically embody an inspirational figure who rises above the rest; this idea is by no means constrained to various religions - it permeates in the mind of every individual who has an aspiration to improve their lives.
I struggle to see how we could live our lives without deeply respecting these stories, and many have instead decided to speak ill of an obscure sentiment nested within these great mythological tales. I put this narrow-minded rejection of deeper truths down as a significant reason for the state of affairs we see today, whereby people live by our most brutal tribal instincts. Identity is paramount: be it race, gender, sexuality. Winning the battle is essential: therefore my moral superiority justifies me resenting you. Far from causing this great divide, hero mythologies throughout our history have brought people together under the rubric of a more rooted sense of meaning, attempting to elevate the human condition beyond such tribalism. Mythological stories are certainly not exempt from justifiable criticism, but the outright rejection of them seems to be a fool's errand.
Turning for a moment to biology; built into the religious motif is an understanding that we can utilise our selfish impulses, which we undoubtedly have, into something inspiring and aspirational. For example, the belief that acting in the pursuit of a good life will result in the ascendency to heaven. The story might not be objectively true, but if we act as if it were true, with all the values incorporated into what we define as a good life, the results bear fruit. This fusion of the metaphorical ideal and the scientific underpinning is what I attribute to the success of western culture. The amalgamation of these systems can be scientifically explained by what we later discovered was the wiring between the left and right hemispheres of our brains, stimulated by both our desire for poetic fiction and scientific discovery. The point at which imaginative fantasies become scientific truths is blurred because the path towards objective truth begins with these primordial impulses. Our understanding of the Big Bang, to take one example, would not have occurred without a prior irrational and romantic desire to look up at the sky above and question how we came to be. What started as astrology and a crude intuition that our fate connected to the cosmos in some manner evolved over centuries to where we are today, a sophisticated understanding of astronomy. It appears to me that the more profound the truth, the harder it is to establish the specifics of that truth. Conversely, the more specific the truth, the more momentary the truth is.
In the absence of concretised understanding, we think in metaphor and fantasy to give us a highly abstracted judgment towards something. Romantic attraction is a significant part of how this manifests itself to us; think about your first crush or first hobby and how irrational you acted as well as how imprecise your initial perceptions of that person or hobby was. Further experience will improve your understanding into something specific (this is broadly speaking where the left hemisphere shoots into action), but that does not render the initial abstraction obsolete - we cannot act in the first place without them. In an expansive landscape with a nearly infinite number of possible interpretations, we have a perceptual system that overlays an abstracted ideal so we can engage with the world around us and thus narrow these interpretations into physical actions. The role of art, literature, music, romantic attraction, et cetera, are the manifestation of these abstracted fantasies into something tangible. It is the attempt to distil, in the most understandable form, serenity from clutter, order out of disorder. Archetypal stories and folklore sit in this conceptual space in my mind, not as literal truths, but a metaphor of something more profound. I view the task of writing as an art form, and as I write this, I am busily attempting to organise my arguments in the most effective manner possible. The value of exceptional artistic endeavour is incalculable, and the inevitable reduction of their value narrowed into a politically tribal setting serves us poorly.
A more robust path is closer to the following. Life is inherently challenging and full of misery, we should recognise that as an essential component of the human condition and seek to minimise this through a mode of being that transcends conscious reality. Instead of being happy just the way we are or forming a moral framework around a single value, like identity or rationality, we should identify our inadequacies and seek to mitigate them through the accumulation of wisdom by understanding that what exists is not what could be. In short, the potential of the human race conflicts with the material world in the continual quest to manifest reality in the image of higher being. The question of how we best achieve this is not something that can be answered by the scientific domain alone. What appears to manifest itself when applying seemingly rational scientific answers to these questions is the decadence of the superordinate structures of the culture itself - and what fills the void is the reflexive tribalism I outlined earlier. Historically, this led to what ensued in the Soviet Union, where proponents of Communism touted it as the only political doctrine grounded in science that would lead to the utopia. The pursuit of this belief led to the complete upending of Russian history and culture, a blank slate for the nation; it had to for it to have any hope of succeeding. Challengers to this correct scientific method were, of course, thrown into gulags. A similar outcome transpired in the fascist states of Italy and Germany, this time through the prism of the science of eugenics and how to create the perfect human society. We must mediate the purely scientific domain with a well developed moral system otherwise catastrophe awaits.
Please do not mistake my criticism of the scientific method in matters of morality as a criticism of the scientific method more broadly. Science has its proper place as the investigation of the material world, philosophy as the investigation of how we should act within that world. I fail to see ourselves flourishing if we throw out both the irrational call to adventure as superstition and the scientific discipline as a product of an oppressive culture. We dismiss both at our peril.