Sacrifice and the wisdom of ideas
In his debut book on the cognitive science of religion, Justin L. Barrett describes the central role that personal sacrifice has to play in adopting and sustaining religious belief. Using the example of witnessing that’s inherent to many successful religions, Barrett outlines the insulating nature of belief that one feels when their faith is met with disinclination from non-coreligionists. There’s a definite investment that one makes for the ideals that they espouse; investments that come at the cost of something that is deemed to be less valuable: a sacrifice; be it social, intellectual, financial, effort- or time-based (or a combination thereof).¹
Sacrifice itself isn’t something to be admonished, it’s merely an engine for change — but the trifling of our rational centres that can animate a futile sacrifice should absolutely be met with opprobrium, lest we encourage exploitation and mindless suffering. And assessing the real value of this sacrifice is something that demands discourse and conversation, so that you might arrive, eventually, at a set of ideas that possesses wisdom. I’m going to spend some time discussing some of the material I’ve come across on human rationality and the consequences of its inexact nature in the world of technological precipitancy.
One of the most revealing intellectual countenances in my exploration of the philosophy of religion is the occasional nuance and sophistication I witnessed in certain species of belief. Logical inconsistency and selective reasoning may be rampant in common religious piety — but these propitious markers of irrationality aren’t monopolised by supernaturalism.² Whilst it may be easy to identify incoherence from the outside, I find the work of cognitive scientists Bloom², Boyer³ and Barrett¹ convincing in explaining why unreason may prevail as an artifact of cognition in serving an evolutionary purpose. In modern parlance, Jesus said it best (if at least the most dramatically):
“Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.”
— Matthew 7:5
I consider myself to be secular humanist, and while I don’t regard all of the virtues that come with secularism nor humanism to be of equal merit, the terms broadly capture my philosophic values with the best precision afforded by two words. But even claims of objectivity in humanism are undermined by inquiry into objectivity, as macrohistorian Yuval Noah Harari observes in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind:
Theist religions focus on the worship of gods. Humanist religions worship humanity, or more correctly, Homo sapiens. Humanism is a belief that Homo sapiens has a unique and sacred nature, which is fundamentally different from the nature of all other animals and of all other phenomena.⁴ (p. 64)
I’ll leave the problematic connotations of ‘worship’ aside, as I feel the point survives. Secular humanism is an ideology that’s often built on naturalism, but there’s nothing objectively true about the primacy of humanity in nature. It can be reasonably and empirically asserted that homo sapiens are the most pioneering, environmentally influential and cognitively advanced species here on earth, but it’s hard to avoid the teleological lever that must be pulled in order to reach any intrinsic sanctity of our species amongst nature.
It might be tempting to throw up our hands and admit that we’re all just deluding ourselves. We might well be, but philosopher Thomas Nagel offers a compelling case for why we might want to maintain our intellectual composure despite a lack of certitude:
Philosophical skepticism does not cause us to abandon our ordinary beliefs, but it lends them a peculiar flavor. After acknowledging that their truth is incompatible with possibilities that we have no grounds for believing do not obtain — apart from grounds in those very beliefs which we have called into question — we return to our familiar convictions with a certain irony and resignation.⁵
Irrationality may be instrumental in our day-to-day function but acknowledging its presence doesn’t automatically render rationality as meretricious folly. Despite its imperfections, understanding rationality and its pitfalls may be the only way for modern secular society to survive the explosion of tribalising forces that social and alternative media represents in today’s world.
Journalist Kurt Andersen wrote a fascinating article in this month’s issue of The Atlantic Magazine, beginning “When did America become untethered from reality?”, describing his criticism of social neo-libertarian esteem and the promotion of conspiracy to the mainstream (and artfully explaining how we got there). Ultimately, Andersen feels that the world has changed with regards to knowledge, implicating rationality:
People in “the reality-based community,” he told a reporter, “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality … That’s not the way the world really works anymore.”⁶
UFO sightings, exobiological political agency (literally the claim that some politicians are known to be aliens), 9/11 conspiracists, flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers etc. all found their beliefs on the ambivalence of human rationality, fully exposed to the logical inconsistency and selective reasoning we tend to favour. What’s worse is that proponents who adopt these beliefs find themselves footing the quagmire of intellectual pariahdom — a social sacrifice that can serve to inure one from criticism encountered during the rational appropriation of ideas. Disarmed of a phronetic application of rationale, the sacrifice encountered bears a stark resemblance to those investments made in the fostering religious belief, as described by Barrett, the confluence of which serves to entrench ideas regardless of their attachment to reality.
As Western libertarianism evolves, we find ourselves vouchsafing anti-elitism in wisdom and sacralising delusions of certitude, mostly underwritten by an unprecedented access to technology and discursive approaches to reason; where a quick web search can venerate our prefabricated knowledge.⁷ There’s nothing new in the practice of sacralising delusion — all you have to do is examine the attitudes towards an extant religion or ideology that is not your own (one that is not culturally disfavoured). Chances are this ideology has been safeguarded against criticism for no greater reason than politeness.
I think there’s a common assumption that teaching ‘critical thinking skills’ will ensure the survival of wisdom, but the machinations of our ramshackle applications of rationality have been at work since long before written history; and continues to be celebrated by religious institution, unchecked nationalism and neo-libertarianism. It’s starting to feel like the tools we’re equipped with for critical thinking might be rendered useless against the infinitude of ideas that dominate the media: mainstream, alternative, social, fake or otherwise.
“What’s the harm in irrationality?” Well, most of the time it’s harmless; but rationality, much like sacrifice, is also an engine for change — the more interesting question might be “what’s the harm in disarming yourself of rationality anchored by observation?” There’s plenty of examples of this in annals of history; here are some of the more interesting cases:
Footnotes
- 2004. Justin L. Barrett, Why Would Anyone Believe in God?
https://www.worldcat.org/title/why-would-anyone-believe-in-god/oclc/265479173&referer=brief_results - 2012. Paul Bloom. Religion, Morality, Evolution
http://minddevlab.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/religion-morality-evolution.pdf - 2000. Pascal Boyer. Functional Origins of Religious Concepts: Conceptual and Strategic Selection in Evolved Minds
http://www.pascalboyer.net/articles/FunctionalOrigins.pdf - 2011. Yuval Noah Harari. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
https://books.google.com.au/books?id=1EiJAwAAQBAJ&dq=harari+sapiens&source=gbs_navlinks_s - 1971. Thomas Nagel. The Absurd
https://philosophy.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/The%20Absurd%20-%20Thomas%20Nagel.pdf - 2012. Kurt Andersen. How America Lost its Mind
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/how-america-lost-its-mind/534231/ - 2015. David McRaney & Matthew Fisher. You Are not so Smart Podcast 063 — How search engines make us feel smarter than we really are
https://youarenotsosmart.com/2015/11/25/yanss-063-how-search-engines-make-us-feel-smarter-than-we-really-are/
