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Notes -
As @MaiqTheTrue says, the rot goes back much longer and, I would add, across many different domains.
This is at the root of anti-enlightenment / anti-modernist thinking (a position I seemingly become more comfortable with daily). Humans used to have a much more humble and limited opinion of their ability to understand the complexity of the universe and capital-T "Truth." Much of that was left to religion, theology, or, sometimes, applied ethics and morality. In fact, even the best thinkers of the enlightenment period had a totally different conception of religion and faith in terms of epistemic systems.
Whereas today, in purely rational terms, it is fashionable to draw a box around theology and religion as a kind of esoteric study of the human spirit or heart, classically, religion and theology was seen as a bedrock component of any knowledge system in much the same way we might think of arithmetic, basic grammar, or ... geography? (you take your pick).
And I think it's taken 300 or so years for the compounding effects of that loss to be felt. Your post highlights demoralization as a key issue. Many other places I've seen the term "crisis of meaning" thrown around. The figures for male suicides, drug overdose, and chornic alcoholism are often lumped together as "deaths of despair." The problem, to me, seems to be that a purely rational worldview creates a fundamentally underdeveloped system of knowledge and personal agency - we really do become the rational ideal. That is, information processors. But that alone does not make life livable, nor does it do anything to orient us towards useful application of information processing. One thing I know for sure about Scott from SSC - he is a world class thinker. Another thing I know for sure - sometimes he chooses the goofiest things to think about.
The various more developed religions do a lot to remedy this. The more purely "spiritual" ones (Buddhism etc.) I think aren't as great because they fail in engaging with the world in the opposite direction of rationalism. Instead of overthinking, they actively cultivate a profound detachment from things that may subjectively feel serene and peacful but is just a different method of undermining prosocial activities. If people find themselves adverse to organized religion, I see the most effective systems being some of the classic virtue ethics regimes -- stoicism etc.
There's going to (always) be a temptation to secularize the religious in order to try to split the baby and get the maximum amount of "meaning" without all of that pesky sin-and-metaphysics. This is the primary critique of Kant's categorical imperative. And I think it's a valid critique - secularizing something that is inherently not isn't possible and you're more likely engaging in some elaborate self-deception. Play the tape forward and you end up with wokeism - which has all of the anthropological trappings of a religious belief system yet is rife with internal contradictions and has zero rigorous epistemic construction.
In a nutshell, people need to cultivate a sense of faith - deeply held belief something transcendent and beyond themselves that they can orient a life towards. And there needs to be an accompanying practice of it. Just like physical fitness or general mental acuity, if you aren't doing "it" everyday, you're getting worse at it.
That’s absurd. Believing in something really hard doesn’t make it true, nor does it make it good. You’re opening the door to a lot more than the classic deontologies. New Age woo, personality cults, ultranationalism—they’re a lot harder to discount once you throw out rationality.
I think it’s also ridiculous to accuse the Buddhists of being “less developed” than, presumably, Christians. Doubly so if you’re considering the initial Protestants, the Second Great Awakening sects, any of the charismatic branches. Criticizing the parent church for being too materialist was like half their reason for splitting.
Oh, and of course you trot out the old punching bag. I don’t exactly disagree that “wokeism” is missing key traits of a religion, so I have to ask: do you think it would work any better as a movement if it abandoned all pretense of materialism? Would the practitioners be happier, would they resolve their internal contradictions?
Because it sounds like a lot of double standards. They should stop overthinking, but also be logically consistent. Oh, and they can’t underthink, either, or they’ll undermine their prosocial activities. Those get measured in material terms, so that subjective serenity must be worthless. Also, material terms don’t matter, and the real failing is allowing a “crisis of meaning.” Everyone should develop their own faith, except where it contradicts with your values, in which case they can get bent.
I don’t think your position is consistent.
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