Very funny this is partly in response to a Brooks piece. He fits nihilism very well. Doesn’t every really write about much and when cornered contends that most of his attempts to make points are really just vibes[0] like famously claiming $60 spent on alcohol and a $17 burger make him relatable to Americans struggling with inflation[1].
But particularly hilarious is that he wrote this exact piece two months ago in the Atlantic[2]. He argued that the Greeks had it right and we all need to be more virtuous again.
As someone who’d describe themselves as a virtue ethicist I’d be inclined to agree. Utilitarianism leads to the bureaucratic tyranny Arendt discusses and deontology is just as hollow as belief in belief. The reality is that we can’t optimize ourselves out of where we are.
> Utilitarianism leads to the bureaucratic tyranny Arendt discusses and deontology is just as hollow as belief in belief.
Can you sketch your reasoning behind these claims? And put forth the most common criticisms against virtue ethics, and defend your position against these criticisms? I don't agree with you, but you have not given me a sufficiently tight argument to convince me or take issue with.
>we need to work to bring back the Ancient Greek model of the polis and in particular the Ancient Greek model of politics as what gives life meaning.
The Ancient Greek model of politics isn't compatible with liberal pluralism. The former assumes a common end and the latter assumes diverse conflicting ends. The Ancient Greek model looks more like modern China than it does like modern America or Europe.
The ancient Greek model assumes a common end but in practice there were many conflicts demonstrating the ends were conflicting. The model itself is like the ideal form. Suggesting that western politics adopt this model when the current state of things opposes it is not necessarily an error.
I'm sympathetic to your take, but I disagree. I personally find a powerful call for non-violence in Christianity, specifically in the Gospels. But there are at least a few other worldviews out there that result in a life dedicated to peace and love.
And I think this is tangential to your point, but it has to be said that there are many different approaches to Christianity, many of which have lead (and are actively leading) to terrible violence.
Why in a particular do you believe that Christianity is the only religion and/or belief fit for this purpose? It seems like a very bold statement given the overlapping and diverse nature of religious beliefs.
The sermon on the mount was a moral quantum leap at the time it was delivered. “Love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you.” You aren’t getting that anywhere else. Additionally, the entire narrative around the crucifixion of a perfectly innocent victim is designed to put the “what if I’m wrong” voice in the back of your head when you’re engaging in mob or retributive violence.
Do you have a lot of experience and knowledge around other non-Abrahamic world religions to make such a bold claim?
Because I can think of at least a few (Jainism, various Chinese schools of thought, etc) that capture the spirit if not the exact message of "love your enemy".
Yeah, the Buddhist or Jain approach is more about detachment and non-harm. It feels almost clinical in its universality. “Love your enemies” is much more personal and emotionally demanding. It’s not just “don’t hurt people” or “be compassionate to all beings,” it’s specifically telling you to have positive feelings toward people who are actively trying to harm you. Combine with the innocent victim motif and you get something really unique.
> It feels almost clinical in its universality. “Love your enemies” is much more personal and emotionally demanding.
To me, “Love your enemies”, feels abusive -- or being groomed for abuse. Love those who hurt you. I agree that is more emotionally demanding, mostly in a personally harmful way. I'll take Buddha's approach to Devadatta over the Jesus "love your enemy". I can have compassion and understanding for an enemy, I would even say it's vital to preventing further harm -- understanding them, their motives and having compassion with that understanding. But loving them? That feels more like inviting violence while pleading with them to stop while handing them a stick. Of course there is a fine line of overlap and in the end both can be taken the same way. I simply believe compassion and understanding is more meaningful and less likely to be used to keep one in an abusive situation.
Jesus was not the first person to preach the concept of loving your enemies. At the very least, everything he preached was based on existing Jewish philosophy, particularly the messianic strain of Judaism he was a part of, but it also existed (and preceded Christ) in Buddhism, Taoism and the Babylonian Councils of Wisdom. Nothing Jesus preached was unique.
I suggest a look at the Esoterica channel on Youtube for a perspective on Jesus as a historical figure in the context of Judaism at the time[0]
I think you’re (or, whoever you’re referencing) is conflating conceptual similarities with actual equivalence. Even if Jesus was building on Jewish tradition, The Hebrew Bible is full of imprecatory psalms calling down curses on enemies. Even the most expansive interpretations of “love your neighbor” in Jewish law didn’t extend to active enemies.
See my other response on eastern thought. “Babylonian Councils of Wisdom” is vague
He's referring to: Do not return evil to the man who disputes with you;
Requite with kindness your evil-doer,
Maintain justice to your enemy,
Smile to your adversary. (Akkadian, before 1100 BC)
Yeah, that’s the problem. In my estimation a large part of it is because Christianity, especially as practiced in the United States, is a cultural phenomenon. Evangelicalism has won the popularity contest, and it’s not moored by anything. There’s an uptick in new Catholics and Orthodox converts though, which are more “moored” if you will by tradition and at least some kind of doctrinal constraint.
I worry the new converts will make Catholicism and Orthodoxy more Evangelical, not the other way around. Just look at the current crop of American Catholics like Thiel and Vance and the vile rhetoric they spit out about their fellow human beings.
Biden was closest to a traditional Catholic and they *loathed* him.
So, since Evangelicals don't meet the bar, but Catholics do, it's not Christianity (the belief in Christ/a singular Judean God) that is the relevant demarcation, it's adherence to canon.
This undermines your thesis, because it's not the mystic woo about virgin birth and transubstantiation and resurrection (which they all profess to believe in) that's important - it's the canon - adherence to which is entirely orthogonal to faith.
No, it is just Christianity that is the demarcation. I’m saying that when you have American evangelicalism (which functions as a social club, and is not moored by anything other than “get people in the door”) as your delivery mechanism, you’re less likely to get solid catechisis. This is of course not impossible, I know many bad catholic Christian’s and many good Protestant Christians, but your odds of getting the good news delivered correctly are higher in more orthodox settings.
How does Catholicism not function as the village social club in its DNA?
It can't in large parts of the US because it's a fringe minority, but doesn't it behave in the exact same way in an area where it is the dominant social affiliation?
Its rituals are just as odd and esoteric as the practices of the stranger evangelical churches.
It does, but the distinction I’m making is that is not its primary function, unlike many evangelical churches in the United States.
Because this is the case, and because of the hierarchy in place for interpreting scripture and handing down sacred tradition, it becomes less likely that there will be problematic theological dilution or drift.
Christianity has been awash in "mimetic violence spirals" for a thousand years, and some of those memes come right out of the Bible. WTF are you even talking about?
The enlightenment wouldn’t have happened without Christianity. universal human dignity, individual rights, the concept that reason can discern moral truth, the university system where Enlightenment thinking developed all grew from Christian soil
I've long thought that Christianity held back human advancement for a good thousand years and now we have evil people pushing Christo-fascism and yet the church leaders seem very quiet.
Surely that's more Western philosophy than Christianity. If anything, Christianity impeded social progress. Even now, the most vocal Christians would contend that moral truths owe to scripture than reason.
But the Church didn't believe in the universality of anything other than their own authority and correctness. Jews, Muslims, and "pagans" (even Protestants and other heretical Christians) were routinely harassed and killed, women were essentially the property of men, slavery was ubiquitous and kings ruled by divine right, all justified by Christian dogma. And they didn't believe in reasoning outside of an explicitly Christian framework or discerning any moral truth not grounded in Biblical doctrine.
Christianity may have inspired the Enlightenment, but the Enlightenment succeeded because it was able to separate philosophy, ethics, law and science (such as it was, "natural philosophy") from Biblical dogma and the Church.
Christianity incorporated a lot of paganism in the medieval era and still maintains it today. You can see it in the old architecture, iconography, and the holidays.
>kings ruled by divine right
Paradoxically, "The Church" was against this idea and it only came about after the Protestant Reformation and the ensuing Thirty Years War.
>slavery was ubiquitous
The history of Christian abolitionists is well documented.
>women were essentially the property of men
Are you talking about Catholic/Orthodox church doctrine, state-run churches like the church of England, the streak of puritanism in the United States, or something else? Are you referring to the teachings in Leviticus/Deuteronomy? The gospel contains multiple instances where Jesus refused to condemn women accused of adultery.
> Paradoxically, "The Church" was against this idea and it only came about after the Protestant Reformation and the ensuing Thirty Years War.
No. Search for "Alby's crusade", directly from the Romain church, spain crusades, and Bleda's Expulsion of moriscos (it's clearly a catholic priest idea, but it's not the church as an institution here).
>Christianity incorporated a lot of paganism in the medieval era and still maintains it today. You can see it in the old architecture, iconography, and the holidays.
Yes, Christianity employed syncretism to more easily convert pagans, but then killed or forcibly converted those who refused. Please don't pretend Christianity had some kind of equitable relationship with non-Christian religions, there are entire cultures laid waste by the Church with little remaining but what revisionist versions of their history and culture they chose to write down.
>Paradoxically, "The Church" was against this idea and it only came about after the Protestant Reformation and the ensuing Thirty Years War.
The belief that kings ruled through divine blessing and were given authority over people by God comes directly from the Bible. It certainly existed prior to Protestantism, even if it wasn't explicitly codified as such. And the Church disagreed because they believed the authority claimed by kings belonged to the Pope, not because they believed in separation of church and state.
>The history of Christian abolitionists is well documented.
And yet slavery was ubiquitous and firmly justified by Biblical principles. Both are true, but the principle that freedom and dignity were universal and inherent to all human beings, and should not be explicitly tied to or contingent upon religious belief, is a secular ideal. When Paul wrote that "in Christ, there is no Jew or Greek, slave or free," he was talking about equality among Christians, not a universal principle that applied to all people.
>The gospel contains multiple instances where Jesus refused to condemn women accused of adultery.
I would argue that Christianity is more influenced by Paul than Jesus. I understand that's controversial but the history of womens' rights and law (based on Christian principles) around marriage, property rights, sex and womens' sufferage seems to bear it out. You can argue certain things shouldn't have been Christian values, but I would argue that Christianity is what Christians do more so than what they say.
When thinking about Christianity, I personally make the distinction between the Christian faith, and the various Churches i.e. the political institutions that grew around the Christian faith.
In its first few centuries Christianity was community-centered, until about the 4th century when it started getting institutionalized in Rome.
The absolute best resource I've found for educating myself about this topic is John Vervaeke's free online course "Awakening from the meaning crisis". You can search it in YouTube or Spotify.
He explains in detail exactly why a "nostalgic return to religion" cannot save us from, not just nihilism, but the entire set of crises western society is undergoing.
The crises stems not from a loss or lack of meaning, it's from recognizing how limited our forms like narratives and myths/religions provide access to meaning. If we fully recognize the meaning load in any event, it's endlessly connected to past and future events. Any event's local-load is likewise massive. The idea we use metaphors as meaning sinks is bizarre. Metaphors are arbitrary, meaning is not, it is specific. This is the inherent problem.
The scaffolding we use for meaning, language, myth, causality, narratives, these are all Pleistocene tools that have long overstyed their welcome. Access to meaning is a total failure of imagination of the basics.
I'm not disagreeing, but what alternatives are there? And to continue with the tool metaphor: How would we know if it's a better tool? Without a vantage point where we could judge both the tools we have now to the alternative, we might be just trading one flawed tool for another. But I'm not going throw away a flashlight because it doesn't light up the universe either. At least with a flashlight, I can see something.
If what we get to navigate with the flashlight eventually extincts us in folk meaning, then better upgrade the tool.
The problem with meaning is the problem with the words. Get rid of them and their agentic curse that lowballs meaning. There are glyphs, movies, Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, Chorti/Yucatec etc., Chinese, Japanese, Korean.
We use landfill for communication. Western languages are terrible hacks of sense-emotion-syntax. That got hacked in Gutenberg, ASCII, web now AI. It's dead.
Again, I'm sympathetic... but replacing one symbolic system for another doesn't answer the question of how any symbolic system relates to it's "meaning" or even in a more accurate way. We are always in the soup of language, change the seasoning, but we will always be in the soup.
Religion is anti-fragile. The more persecution and negative press it gets, the more certainty we feel in our faiths. I would point out that nihilism is the opposite of religious faith, so the author is a little bit confused on that point.
Correlation does not equal causation. I think people don’t participate in religion because it asks of them. Many people are lazy, greedy or hedonistic. It takes effort and “practice” to be virtuous or religious.
Before Christianity took off there was plenty of “bad press,” to put mildly. Yet here we are.
I guess another way I might restate my point is to invoke the Streisand effect, or note the haters “doth protest too much” or similar notions. YMMV but repeated cathedral burnings and church and synagogue massacres had a remarkable effect on my perception of good and evil. Shooting toddlers at their morning mass; if that ain’t evil then nothing else makes any sense to me.
> I think people don’t participate in religion because it asks of them. Many people are lazy, greedy or hedonistic. It takes effort and “practice” to be virtuous or religious.
Say what you will of "wokeism" but it is an ethic that asks plenty of people. It constantly demands one to evaluate virtuous action or inaction. I don't think people are turning away from religion because it takes work. Because it requires real moral deliberation, it's actually more work than mere obedience to scripture.
My mileage does vary. Countless crimes of abuse and co-option of moral authority enabled by religion has proven to me that evil does exist and the presence of religion or the lack thereof is orthogonal to building a moral society.
This is only true for some religions. Since the author mentions Nietzsche, it feels fair to pull in On the Genealogy of Morality.
Many religions today have this feature because they out-competed religions that didn't, but it's not a universal feature of religions by a long shot. If anything, religions that have this feature are inextricably connected to social coping mechanisms(evidently due the persecution).
If you define religion to include all possible religions, even those that have few adherents, or those that have disappeared or even those not yet created, that’s not a very useful definition. I use “religion” like most people, to refer to Abrahamic religions and large eastern religions like Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, etc
> In a recent op-ed, [David Brooks] warns that a rigid political climate on the left has led people on the right of the political spectrum to actively embrace nihilism.
That’s a strange dodge. "The Left made me do it" is a child's excuse, not an analysis.
The deeper truth is that nihilism isn’t born of politics. Nihilism what's left when after the exhaustion of meaning under total commodification. It's born of the spectacle, the replacement of reality with its endless representations. Every human relation is mediated through an economic relation, and eventually every gesture, every feeling, every passing thought gets rendered into a commodity.
We are desperate for connection, and the spectacle knows it. So it offers us platforms that promise intimacy but can’t deliver it. They were designed not to connect us to other humans but to make us friends with brands. We log in for friendship and get advertising.
Go outside? Good luck. It's empty because this stupid city was designed around cars, and even if there are people, they're tucked into their phones. It's a social ghost town.
If I propose to decommission the spectacle, I'd expect to receive a bewildering array of responses: "naive," "utopian," "impossible." So here we are, trapped in a world of our making where no one has the choice to enter nor to leave and everyone has been leveraged to maintaining it despite no one wanting it.
The author's understanding of ritual/tradition as the sum total what religion means is at best extremely naive, but I am receiving it as condescending and dismissive. There was a way for the author to redeem the subtitle of the article. He could have gone down the route of "ritual for ritual's sake is not good, but the bigger thing that ritual is attached to is good". But instead, the argument went "religious ritual is empty and has nothing else attached to it, and that's bad; let's be sure to attach Humanism to the ritual to make it good."
The irony of the whole thing is that Humanism is a religion too, though many people won't recognize it as such. This makes the author's argument doubly misguided.
Nihilism appeals because the root causes are oligarchy and kleptocracy: when you realize you are powerless in the large, the only real alternatives are disengagement and violence in the small. Why violence? In this context, it is the only thing guaranteed to leave a mark.
The third alternative, the difficult way, is social engagement on a path to social democracy, to limiting the reach of autocrats and robber barons, and to defetishizing the first two amendments.
But that path requires lifting one's eyes, abandoning one's out groups, working with all, and foregoing at least some comfort and self advantage.
It is the only way. I doubt I will see it (entered 7th decade recently, feel pretty confident about that).
Sure, but for many, it's a place for community too. Rites of passage. Selecting a godparent. And singing! Hey without gospel music, we might not have had Motown.
Also, in some religions the temples are places for job searching, business networking... nothing wrong with that.
I wish I could have faith, a double major in science and philosophy killed all of that. But mystical moments still happen without all of the religious trappings, in conversation or nature.
I just don't know. Here in the US, Christian ethics still predominate, usually, and without organized religious participation, will that continue? Is it too much work to agonize over decisions without it?
A more careful reading of the Bible will tell you that the Bible does not say that "rich people won't go to heaven" so much as "anyone who is fixated on riches won't go to heaven".
As Haydock’s commentary puts it: “The apostles wondered how any person could be saved, not because all were rich, but because the poor were also included, who had their hearts and affections fixed on riches.” The problem with the rich young man, then, was not that he was rich, but that he valued riches above following Christ. And that is a spiritual malady that can afflict even those who are not rich.
> And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.
And no, there was no city gate called "The Eye of the Needle". That was made up by people trying to convince themselves they could hoard money and still go to heaven.
When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished and asked, “Who then can be saved?” Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” (Matthew 19:25–26, ESV)
Doubtful. Far right violence "knows" christ just as well as the atheist and anchoring it in a symbol that's already fractured, is just painting nihilism with random paints that are just as nihilistic.
Think of nihilism like all the colors in the visible spectrum, but instead of creating white, they create black because they're physically constrained, not metaphorically.
As such, every figure associated with every religion once disassociative will _never_ be anything but an anchor for nihilism because of the natural deviations of man's desire to align god's intentions with one's actions, ad hoc.
Very funny this is partly in response to a Brooks piece. He fits nihilism very well. Doesn’t every really write about much and when cornered contends that most of his attempts to make points are really just vibes[0] like famously claiming $60 spent on alcohol and a $17 burger make him relatable to Americans struggling with inflation[1].
But particularly hilarious is that he wrote this exact piece two months ago in the Atlantic[2]. He argued that the Greeks had it right and we all need to be more virtuous again.
As someone who’d describe themselves as a virtue ethicist I’d be inclined to agree. Utilitarianism leads to the bureaucratic tyranny Arendt discusses and deontology is just as hollow as belief in belief. The reality is that we can’t optimize ourselves out of where we are.
[0]: https://www.foodandwine.com/1911-smoke-house-bbq-david-brook...
[1]: https://newrepublic.com/article/142708/david-brooks-tyranny-...
[2]: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/07/trump-admi...
> Utilitarianism leads to the bureaucratic tyranny Arendt discusses and deontology is just as hollow as belief in belief.
Can you sketch your reasoning behind these claims? And put forth the most common criticisms against virtue ethics, and defend your position against these criticisms? I don't agree with you, but you have not given me a sufficiently tight argument to convince me or take issue with.
>we need to work to bring back the Ancient Greek model of the polis and in particular the Ancient Greek model of politics as what gives life meaning.
The Ancient Greek model of politics isn't compatible with liberal pluralism. The former assumes a common end and the latter assumes diverse conflicting ends. The Ancient Greek model looks more like modern China than it does like modern America or Europe.
The ancient Greek model assumes a common end but in practice there were many conflicts demonstrating the ends were conflicting. The model itself is like the ideal form. Suggesting that western politics adopt this model when the current state of things opposes it is not necessarily an error.
Aside from being true, Christianity is basically the only way to inoculate yourself against mimetic violence spirals. Which is missed here.
I'm sympathetic to your take, but I disagree. I personally find a powerful call for non-violence in Christianity, specifically in the Gospels. But there are at least a few other worldviews out there that result in a life dedicated to peace and love.
And I think this is tangential to your point, but it has to be said that there are many different approaches to Christianity, many of which have lead (and are actively leading) to terrible violence.
Why in a particular do you believe that Christianity is the only religion and/or belief fit for this purpose? It seems like a very bold statement given the overlapping and diverse nature of religious beliefs.
The sermon on the mount was a moral quantum leap at the time it was delivered. “Love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you.” You aren’t getting that anywhere else. Additionally, the entire narrative around the crucifixion of a perfectly innocent victim is designed to put the “what if I’m wrong” voice in the back of your head when you’re engaging in mob or retributive violence.
Do you have a lot of experience and knowledge around other non-Abrahamic world religions to make such a bold claim?
Because I can think of at least a few (Jainism, various Chinese schools of thought, etc) that capture the spirit if not the exact message of "love your enemy".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohism
Yeah, the Buddhist or Jain approach is more about detachment and non-harm. It feels almost clinical in its universality. “Love your enemies” is much more personal and emotionally demanding. It’s not just “don’t hurt people” or “be compassionate to all beings,” it’s specifically telling you to have positive feelings toward people who are actively trying to harm you. Combine with the innocent victim motif and you get something really unique.
> It feels almost clinical in its universality. “Love your enemies” is much more personal and emotionally demanding.
To me, “Love your enemies”, feels abusive -- or being groomed for abuse. Love those who hurt you. I agree that is more emotionally demanding, mostly in a personally harmful way. I'll take Buddha's approach to Devadatta over the Jesus "love your enemy". I can have compassion and understanding for an enemy, I would even say it's vital to preventing further harm -- understanding them, their motives and having compassion with that understanding. But loving them? That feels more like inviting violence while pleading with them to stop while handing them a stick. Of course there is a fine line of overlap and in the end both can be taken the same way. I simply believe compassion and understanding is more meaningful and less likely to be used to keep one in an abusive situation.
Jesus was not the first person to preach the concept of loving your enemies. At the very least, everything he preached was based on existing Jewish philosophy, particularly the messianic strain of Judaism he was a part of, but it also existed (and preceded Christ) in Buddhism, Taoism and the Babylonian Councils of Wisdom. Nothing Jesus preached was unique.
I suggest a look at the Esoterica channel on Youtube for a perspective on Jesus as a historical figure in the context of Judaism at the time[0]
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82vxOBbYSzk
I think you’re (or, whoever you’re referencing) is conflating conceptual similarities with actual equivalence. Even if Jesus was building on Jewish tradition, The Hebrew Bible is full of imprecatory psalms calling down curses on enemies. Even the most expansive interpretations of “love your neighbor” in Jewish law didn’t extend to active enemies.
See my other response on eastern thought. “Babylonian Councils of Wisdom” is vague
He's referring to: Do not return evil to the man who disputes with you; Requite with kindness your evil-doer, Maintain justice to your enemy, Smile to your adversary. (Akkadian, before 1100 BC)
Many modern supply-side Christians don't believe in any of those parts of the Bible.
Turn the other cheek, love thy neighbour, etc, etc, are not something they are keen on.
Yeah, that’s the problem. In my estimation a large part of it is because Christianity, especially as practiced in the United States, is a cultural phenomenon. Evangelicalism has won the popularity contest, and it’s not moored by anything. There’s an uptick in new Catholics and Orthodox converts though, which are more “moored” if you will by tradition and at least some kind of doctrinal constraint.
I worry the new converts will make Catholicism and Orthodoxy more Evangelical, not the other way around. Just look at the current crop of American Catholics like Thiel and Vance and the vile rhetoric they spit out about their fellow human beings.
Biden was closest to a traditional Catholic and they *loathed* him.
So, since Evangelicals don't meet the bar, but Catholics do, it's not Christianity (the belief in Christ/a singular Judean God) that is the relevant demarcation, it's adherence to canon.
This undermines your thesis, because it's not the mystic woo about virgin birth and transubstantiation and resurrection (which they all profess to believe in) that's important - it's the canon - adherence to which is entirely orthogonal to faith.
No, it is just Christianity that is the demarcation. I’m saying that when you have American evangelicalism (which functions as a social club, and is not moored by anything other than “get people in the door”) as your delivery mechanism, you’re less likely to get solid catechisis. This is of course not impossible, I know many bad catholic Christian’s and many good Protestant Christians, but your odds of getting the good news delivered correctly are higher in more orthodox settings.
How does Catholicism not function as the village social club in its DNA?
It can't in large parts of the US because it's a fringe minority, but doesn't it behave in the exact same way in an area where it is the dominant social affiliation?
Its rituals are just as odd and esoteric as the practices of the stranger evangelical churches.
It does, but the distinction I’m making is that is not its primary function, unlike many evangelical churches in the United States.
Because this is the case, and because of the hierarchy in place for interpreting scripture and handing down sacred tradition, it becomes less likely that there will be problematic theological dilution or drift.
Christianity has been awash in "mimetic violence spirals" for a thousand years, and some of those memes come right out of the Bible. WTF are you even talking about?
People have free will and make poor decisions, but on whole it has pulled society in the right direction over the long arc of history.
I would argue that on the whole post-Enlightenment secularism has pulled Christianity in the right direction over the long arc of history.
The enlightenment wouldn’t have happened without Christianity. universal human dignity, individual rights, the concept that reason can discern moral truth, the university system where Enlightenment thinking developed all grew from Christian soil
The enlightenment happened despite Christianity.
I've long thought that Christianity held back human advancement for a good thousand years and now we have evil people pushing Christo-fascism and yet the church leaders seem very quiet.
Surely that's more Western philosophy than Christianity. If anything, Christianity impeded social progress. Even now, the most vocal Christians would contend that moral truths owe to scripture than reason.
But the Church didn't believe in the universality of anything other than their own authority and correctness. Jews, Muslims, and "pagans" (even Protestants and other heretical Christians) were routinely harassed and killed, women were essentially the property of men, slavery was ubiquitous and kings ruled by divine right, all justified by Christian dogma. And they didn't believe in reasoning outside of an explicitly Christian framework or discerning any moral truth not grounded in Biblical doctrine.
Christianity may have inspired the Enlightenment, but the Enlightenment succeeded because it was able to separate philosophy, ethics, law and science (such as it was, "natural philosophy") from Biblical dogma and the Church.
This is a skewed take.
>pagans" [...] were routinely harassed and killed
Christianity incorporated a lot of paganism in the medieval era and still maintains it today. You can see it in the old architecture, iconography, and the holidays.
>kings ruled by divine right
Paradoxically, "The Church" was against this idea and it only came about after the Protestant Reformation and the ensuing Thirty Years War.
>slavery was ubiquitous
The history of Christian abolitionists is well documented.
>women were essentially the property of men
Are you talking about Catholic/Orthodox church doctrine, state-run churches like the church of England, the streak of puritanism in the United States, or something else? Are you referring to the teachings in Leviticus/Deuteronomy? The gospel contains multiple instances where Jesus refused to condemn women accused of adultery.
> Paradoxically, "The Church" was against this idea and it only came about after the Protestant Reformation and the ensuing Thirty Years War.
No. Search for "Alby's crusade", directly from the Romain church, spain crusades, and Bleda's Expulsion of moriscos (it's clearly a catholic priest idea, but it's not the church as an institution here).
>Christianity incorporated a lot of paganism in the medieval era and still maintains it today. You can see it in the old architecture, iconography, and the holidays.
Yes, Christianity employed syncretism to more easily convert pagans, but then killed or forcibly converted those who refused. Please don't pretend Christianity had some kind of equitable relationship with non-Christian religions, there are entire cultures laid waste by the Church with little remaining but what revisionist versions of their history and culture they chose to write down.
>Paradoxically, "The Church" was against this idea and it only came about after the Protestant Reformation and the ensuing Thirty Years War.
The belief that kings ruled through divine blessing and were given authority over people by God comes directly from the Bible. It certainly existed prior to Protestantism, even if it wasn't explicitly codified as such. And the Church disagreed because they believed the authority claimed by kings belonged to the Pope, not because they believed in separation of church and state.
>The history of Christian abolitionists is well documented.
And yet slavery was ubiquitous and firmly justified by Biblical principles. Both are true, but the principle that freedom and dignity were universal and inherent to all human beings, and should not be explicitly tied to or contingent upon religious belief, is a secular ideal. When Paul wrote that "in Christ, there is no Jew or Greek, slave or free," he was talking about equality among Christians, not a universal principle that applied to all people.
>The gospel contains multiple instances where Jesus refused to condemn women accused of adultery.
I would argue that Christianity is more influenced by Paul than Jesus. I understand that's controversial but the history of womens' rights and law (based on Christian principles) around marriage, property rights, sex and womens' sufferage seems to bear it out. You can argue certain things shouldn't have been Christian values, but I would argue that Christianity is what Christians do more so than what they say.
When thinking about Christianity, I personally make the distinction between the Christian faith, and the various Churches i.e. the political institutions that grew around the Christian faith.
In its first few centuries Christianity was community-centered, until about the 4th century when it started getting institutionalized in Rome.
The absolute best resource I've found for educating myself about this topic is John Vervaeke's free online course "Awakening from the meaning crisis". You can search it in YouTube or Spotify.
He explains in detail exactly why a "nostalgic return to religion" cannot save us from, not just nihilism, but the entire set of crises western society is undergoing.
The crises stems not from a loss or lack of meaning, it's from recognizing how limited our forms like narratives and myths/religions provide access to meaning. If we fully recognize the meaning load in any event, it's endlessly connected to past and future events. Any event's local-load is likewise massive. The idea we use metaphors as meaning sinks is bizarre. Metaphors are arbitrary, meaning is not, it is specific. This is the inherent problem.
The scaffolding we use for meaning, language, myth, causality, narratives, these are all Pleistocene tools that have long overstyed their welcome. Access to meaning is a total failure of imagination of the basics.
I'm not disagreeing, but what alternatives are there? And to continue with the tool metaphor: How would we know if it's a better tool? Without a vantage point where we could judge both the tools we have now to the alternative, we might be just trading one flawed tool for another. But I'm not going throw away a flashlight because it doesn't light up the universe either. At least with a flashlight, I can see something.
If what we get to navigate with the flashlight eventually extincts us in folk meaning, then better upgrade the tool.
The problem with meaning is the problem with the words. Get rid of them and their agentic curse that lowballs meaning. There are glyphs, movies, Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, Chorti/Yucatec etc., Chinese, Japanese, Korean.
We use landfill for communication. Western languages are terrible hacks of sense-emotion-syntax. That got hacked in Gutenberg, ASCII, web now AI. It's dead.
Again, I'm sympathetic... but replacing one symbolic system for another doesn't answer the question of how any symbolic system relates to it's "meaning" or even in a more accurate way. We are always in the soup of language, change the seasoning, but we will always be in the soup.
The series:
https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLND1JCRq8Vuh3f0P5qjrSdb...
This reads more like misdirection than analysis. Suggesting religion is just a collection of empty rituals is just sad.
It's almost as if he's trying to prevent those looking for help from considering religion.
"You don't want those gold bars over there, they're just painted rocks". But are they?
Religion is anti-fragile. The more persecution and negative press it gets, the more certainty we feel in our faiths. I would point out that nihilism is the opposite of religious faith, so the author is a little bit confused on that point.
Negative press about religion, whether its corruption or its inefficacy, has led to lower participation in religion the world over.
Correlation does not equal causation. I think people don’t participate in religion because it asks of them. Many people are lazy, greedy or hedonistic. It takes effort and “practice” to be virtuous or religious.
Before Christianity took off there was plenty of “bad press,” to put mildly. Yet here we are.
I guess another way I might restate my point is to invoke the Streisand effect, or note the haters “doth protest too much” or similar notions. YMMV but repeated cathedral burnings and church and synagogue massacres had a remarkable effect on my perception of good and evil. Shooting toddlers at their morning mass; if that ain’t evil then nothing else makes any sense to me.
> I think people don’t participate in religion because it asks of them. Many people are lazy, greedy or hedonistic. It takes effort and “practice” to be virtuous or religious.
Say what you will of "wokeism" but it is an ethic that asks plenty of people. It constantly demands one to evaluate virtuous action or inaction. I don't think people are turning away from religion because it takes work. Because it requires real moral deliberation, it's actually more work than mere obedience to scripture.
My mileage does vary. Countless crimes of abuse and co-option of moral authority enabled by religion has proven to me that evil does exist and the presence of religion or the lack thereof is orthogonal to building a moral society.
This is only true for some religions. Since the author mentions Nietzsche, it feels fair to pull in On the Genealogy of Morality.
Many religions today have this feature because they out-competed religions that didn't, but it's not a universal feature of religions by a long shot. If anything, religions that have this feature are inextricably connected to social coping mechanisms(evidently due the persecution).
If you define religion to include all possible religions, even those that have few adherents, or those that have disappeared or even those not yet created, that’s not a very useful definition. I use “religion” like most people, to refer to Abrahamic religions and large eastern religions like Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, etc
Why is this very interesting post about the philosophy of nihilism and empty rituals flagged?
Well, Church isn’t God.
So I’ll grant them the title. But the stronger claim, that God won’t save us from nihilism, I disagree with entirely.
> In a recent op-ed, [David Brooks] warns that a rigid political climate on the left has led people on the right of the political spectrum to actively embrace nihilism.
That’s a strange dodge. "The Left made me do it" is a child's excuse, not an analysis.
The deeper truth is that nihilism isn’t born of politics. Nihilism what's left when after the exhaustion of meaning under total commodification. It's born of the spectacle, the replacement of reality with its endless representations. Every human relation is mediated through an economic relation, and eventually every gesture, every feeling, every passing thought gets rendered into a commodity.
We are desperate for connection, and the spectacle knows it. So it offers us platforms that promise intimacy but can’t deliver it. They were designed not to connect us to other humans but to make us friends with brands. We log in for friendship and get advertising.
Go outside? Good luck. It's empty because this stupid city was designed around cars, and even if there are people, they're tucked into their phones. It's a social ghost town.
If I propose to decommission the spectacle, I'd expect to receive a bewildering array of responses: "naive," "utopian," "impossible." So here we are, trapped in a world of our making where no one has the choice to enter nor to leave and everyone has been leveraged to maintaining it despite no one wanting it.
Good job. We have only ourselves to blame.
The author's understanding of ritual/tradition as the sum total what religion means is at best extremely naive, but I am receiving it as condescending and dismissive. There was a way for the author to redeem the subtitle of the article. He could have gone down the route of "ritual for ritual's sake is not good, but the bigger thing that ritual is attached to is good". But instead, the argument went "religious ritual is empty and has nothing else attached to it, and that's bad; let's be sure to attach Humanism to the ritual to make it good."
The irony of the whole thing is that Humanism is a religion too, though many people won't recognize it as such. This makes the author's argument doubly misguided.
Nihilism appeals because the root causes are oligarchy and kleptocracy: when you realize you are powerless in the large, the only real alternatives are disengagement and violence in the small. Why violence? In this context, it is the only thing guaranteed to leave a mark.
The third alternative, the difficult way, is social engagement on a path to social democracy, to limiting the reach of autocrats and robber barons, and to defetishizing the first two amendments.
But that path requires lifting one's eyes, abandoning one's out groups, working with all, and foregoing at least some comfort and self advantage.
It is the only way. I doubt I will see it (entered 7th decade recently, feel pretty confident about that).
Sure, but for many, it's a place for community too. Rites of passage. Selecting a godparent. And singing! Hey without gospel music, we might not have had Motown.
Also, in some religions the temples are places for job searching, business networking... nothing wrong with that.
I wish I could have faith, a double major in science and philosophy killed all of that. But mystical moments still happen without all of the religious trappings, in conversation or nature.
I just don't know. Here in the US, Christian ethics still predominate, usually, and without organized religious participation, will that continue? Is it too much work to agonize over decisions without it?
Obviously it’s a very broad question, but could I ask you to elaborate on why “a double major in science and philosophy killed all of that”?
The best way to deal with nihilism is by also becoming a narcisist, which as we can see from many of the people in power, is extra creeply effective.
and the best way to deal with narcisism is becoming a nihilist, thus creating the spiral of doom
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Thanks brother
Good idea. Let's start with "love thy neighbor" and "rich people won't go to heaven".
A more careful reading of the Bible will tell you that the Bible does not say that "rich people won't go to heaven" so much as "anyone who is fixated on riches won't go to heaven".
As Haydock’s commentary puts it: “The apostles wondered how any person could be saved, not because all were rich, but because the poor were also included, who had their hearts and affections fixed on riches.” The problem with the rich young man, then, was not that he was rich, but that he valued riches above following Christ. And that is a spiritual malady that can afflict even those who are not rich.
Took all of 4 minutes to start splitting on dogma. Masterclass in human relations.
> And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.
And no, there was no city gate called "The Eye of the Needle". That was made up by people trying to convince themselves they could hoard money and still go to heaven.
But the immediate next two sentences say:
When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished and asked, “Who then can be saved?” Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” (Matthew 19:25–26, ESV)
"I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."
Doubtful. Far right violence "knows" christ just as well as the atheist and anchoring it in a symbol that's already fractured, is just painting nihilism with random paints that are just as nihilistic.
Think of nihilism like all the colors in the visible spectrum, but instead of creating white, they create black because they're physically constrained, not metaphorically.
As such, every figure associated with every religion once disassociative will _never_ be anything but an anchor for nihilism because of the natural deviations of man's desire to align god's intentions with one's actions, ad hoc.
Alright sour pusses. Tell me which denomination _knows_ christ: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_denomination...
Surely if "he" is real, atleast one of them has figured it out.
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