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Maps of Meaning looks very promising. I will give that a read, thank you for the recommendation.
See, I’m skeptical that delving into the specific rituals of different arcane traditions, which often contain conflicting rules anyways, will give me much wisdom. What I want are the insights, not the surface level admonishments you mention. I can learn that Jews have their holy day on Saturday, Christians on Sunday, and Muslims on Friday without ever realizing that the point of all this is that
But how do I learn the actual wisdom latent in such traditions when no esoteric ancient text will explicitly come out and say something like, “We taboo this behavior in order to maintain its signaling value”? Instead, they always put forth some silly reason for it (“It is immoral to desecrate the body your parents gave you!”) that is easily dissolved by postmodernism due to its arbitrariness.
That’s what I’m interested in learning more about. Not about whether or not this or that culture banned cutting hair, but about why there was such a continual need for signaling through different forms across different ages, and about what exactly it is we’ve lost with the breakdown in meaning. About the need for Schelling points of rest, and what we lose out on when those Schelling points are commercialized or weakened. And about any other traditional phenomena that have much richer reasons behind them than their surface level justifications would imply.
But what even is this subject? I don’t know how to even Google for it.
I have not heard of traditionalism as a separate political concept from conservatism. Is there a coherent narrative for how this rebirth is supposed to happen? I don’t believe I see much of that in the modern American political discourse; MAGA certainly doesn’t appear to me to have much more vision beyond “Tariff China to bring back American manufacturing!” or “Fire Deep State bureaucrats who are standing in the way of change!” (My neoliberal bias may be showing.)
Sorry, I only brought it up as an example of one case where we appeared to have loosened our grip on a form of expression without any seemingly deleterious effects. With so many different taboos, any single one appears rather redundant, no? Why a ban on both women wearing pants, and tattoos, instead of just one?
Well it's a bit difficult to get the insights without the contextual knowledge. And the problem is that ordering those insights into a coherent framework only does one thing: it creates a new esoteric tradition.
Sociology without bias may not even be possible. So all you can really do is look for the insights from various viewpoints.
I think you'll enjoy Peterson if that's what you're looking for, but Psychology is itself an esoteric tradition. It seems more compatible with your own biases so you can get the insights the way you are most able to consume them, but that's not true for everyone.
The problem, and Peterson talks about this, is that sometimes we don't or can't possibly know why we do a thing, and even that sometimes knowing why we do the thing dispels the effect altogether.
For instance, it would have been completely unreasonable for most of history to expect people to come up with germ theory, and yet they needed a way to model contagious diseases to survive. Modeling those as divine punishment or what have you is a crude but effective way to solve this problem.
Here I think it may be of use to point to Quine and Epistemic Naturalism. Science it self is not actually privileged, it is yet another crude tool we have come up with with different tradeoffs than the previous tools.
All organisms need, for the purposes of survival and reproduction, to model the world in just the way that science or any other epistemology does. And the more a model follows the following criteria, the better it is:
As should be evident, these criteria are in conflict with each other. A more accurate model may be less efficient, a more flexible model may be less coherent, etc.
And importantly, different models may be suited for different ends. Newtonian physics is inaccurate, but it is also more efficient than alternatives, which is why we didn't stop using it for engineering when it was proven wrong.
I see many the traditional approach (religion as an epistemic style) as uniquely suited to a particular style of problem: when you need to convey accurate information with enough efficiency that the common people can use it and you're willing to sacrifice enough flexibility and coherence to do it.
It's a quite prolific intellectual movement and the answer to your question is so expanded upon that it inspired one of the most consequential ideologies of the XXth century in Fascism.
This is relatively well chronicled from a neutral point of view in Mark Sedgwick's Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century if you are interested.
However, the coherent narrative for rebirth is here part of the larger tradition of social cycle theories.
I quite enjoyed Parvini's recent The Prophets of Doom and it gives a very detailed comparative account of what such theories actually predict and model, including the work of Evola, who is one of the major figures of Traditionalism.
There is of course a lot more at work in society than just these so it is hard to quantify how much constraint society gives the individual in personal expression and at what cost (further complicated by the epistemic issues brought up earlier).
However you are clearly in the right in that it is possible to have too much constraint. As I believe it is possible to have too few. Once again, Durkheim's axis is helpful.
Interesting. What do you consider an “esoteric tradition”?
How did you come up with this list of four criteria? As far as I can tell, they don’t appear to be a standardized part of the field of conceptual modeling.
Thanks for the continued book recommendations. I have started on Maps of Meaning, and intend to visit the other ones you mention about traditionalism and social cycles as well.
In this context, any conceptual framework that contains a dynamic of initiation. Which is to say one where the concepts have two meanings: an exoteric meaning (face value for the uninitiatied) and an esoteric meaning (secret or deeper for the initiated).
It is actually surprisingly hard to create an ideology that is not esoteric in this way, because any sufficiently coherent system requires using words in non-obvious ways. Physics, despite being fully available to the public and not deliberately rife with secret handshakes and rituals, is still esoteric because you need to make a non trivial effort to understand what "spin", "energy", "charm" and other jargon actually refer to, and it's almost impossible to intuit accurately from the context alone.
Stole it from a Naturalist who stole them from Quine. The criteria are staples of epistemology that all have theories of truth constructed around them, I just use my own words here but there's many reformulations of them.
It would appear so, by this definition. Why do you emphasize “esoteric” traditions, then, rather than just traditions if nearly all of them will involve some amount of jargon or deeper meaning?
I see. What are the usual ways of referring to these criteria? Searching for epistemological coherence, for example, leads me to the coherentism versus foundationalism debate, which doesn’t quite appear to be what you were mentioning with coherence as a desirable property of all models.
Because that's all that's required to create the sort of cultish social dynamics that you bemoan and I'm trying to make the point that they're a common feature of complex formal systems of meaning. Not unique to religions.
The truth article has a decent survey and you can intuitively map theories of truth to the criteria: Accuracy is Correspondence/Empiricism, Efficiency is Deflationism/Minimalism, Coherence is Coherentism/Anti-Realism and Flexibility is Pragmatism.
I see. Thank you for the informative discussion! I have much to research now
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