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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   31619 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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But if we accept this conclusion then we can also argue that secular societies are incredibly evolutionarily fit in the landscape of the modern world.

I wouldn't get so ahead of ourselves. Societies have only been secular for the last 60 years or so - depending on how you define it, was 1950s American society (not just government) truly 'secular'? - while religious societies have been around since, well, since the dawn of history. The contemporary secular society is really a flash in the pan compared to the entirely of human history. Yes, I know that you could make some argument that the speed of history is accelerating or whatever, but it's still important to consider that the secular society is still in relative infancy. Any negative consequences of mass but societal changes will usually have some lag time. Maybe the broad decline we're seeing across the West is in part a consequence of the secularisation of society.

In addition to this, it also may be the case that widespread secularism in the first place is a consequence of the removal of environmental/selection pressures. In evolution, there's an idea that once selection pressures are removed, this no longer creates pressure that maintains the traits that were previously adaptive, leading to decay of traits down to the level that selection is operating. Most mutations degrade functioning instead of promoting it, and without selection pressures to weed out these destructive mutations they can accumulate and cause phenotypic loss.

Perhaps there has been a version of this occurring on the social level in that the technological advances in the West have led to relaxed selection pressure on these societies and their norms. It's an idea I've been playing with for a while that abundance and lack of competition has allowed for the fostering of historically unique social practices which can emerge only under a condition of relaxed selection. In other words, only the societies that don't have much to worry about and possess such a decisive advantage that few others can realistically compete with them can actually sustain a secular society (and not without creating problems of internal strife in the process).

This reconciles pretty well with the following observations that 1: secularism is a very recent and localised phenomenon whereas religion was absolutely ubiquitous for the vast majority of human history (and the more organised, moralising religions developed independently many times), 2: evidence exists to suggest that religion has pro-social effects, 3: the key scientific and technological advances that catapulted Western societies into being a world power were made long before they were secular, and 4: the adoption of secularism seems to correlate with the "broad decline" you've mentioned.

Could I have a definition of religion here? I think I could agree with some and disagree with others.

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