A Chesterton-fence style regret about decline of religion, which I just thought of and haven’t seen written down anywhere before.
It’s well know that religion fills human social and psychological needs, including for loyalty and virtue signaling.
It’s easy for loyalty and virtue signaling to spiral out of control and lead to things like religious persecution and holy wars.
Western civilization developed countermeasures to contain the religion-based loyalty and virtue signaling, like separation of church and state.
With religion in decline (in many parts of the world), it’s no longer suitable for loyalty and virtue signaling for many people, and they’ve had to find replacements, which consist of different ideologies for different people.
The old countermeasures against spiraling loyalty and virtue signaling don’t work anymore because the new loyalty and virtue signaling are not based on religion, leading to worse negative consequences for society.
Weren’t the countermeasures kind of very basic, though? Like they weren’t exactly the type of illegibly sophisticated egregores that trads like to worship? Isn’t Tall_poppy_syndrome basically instinctive?
Many of the countermeasures are allergies against specific things. If a Catholic ascends to some position and then fires non-Catholics and promotes Catholics, observers are prepared to notice this and argue it’s violating freedom of religion / using religion for something that it shouldn’t be used for in civil society. But if someone whose ‘religion’ is environmentalism ascends to the same position and fires non-environmentalists and promotes environmentalists, the same allergies might not fire in response. I can’t easily imagine a phrase that’s “freedom of X” that captures not being able to fire someone because they’re not an environmentalist, and this means that if ‘religion’ morphs with the times the defenses posed by ‘freedom of religion’ might not morph with them, and we might end up back in the bad state.
Hmm. Perhaps if there were a consensus that some people have deep, sincere, sometimes metaphysical reasons for not being environmentalists, they could become a protected class. I’m not sure many people do, myself.
A Chesterton-fence style regret about decline of religion, which I just thought of and haven’t seen written down anywhere before.
It’s well know that religion fills human social and psychological needs, including for loyalty and virtue signaling.
It’s easy for loyalty and virtue signaling to spiral out of control and lead to things like religious persecution and holy wars.
Western civilization developed countermeasures to contain the religion-based loyalty and virtue signaling, like separation of church and state.
With religion in decline (in many parts of the world), it’s no longer suitable for loyalty and virtue signaling for many people, and they’ve had to find replacements, which consist of different ideologies for different people.
The old countermeasures against spiraling loyalty and virtue signaling don’t work anymore because the new loyalty and virtue signaling are not based on religion, leading to worse negative consequences for society.
Weren’t the countermeasures kind of very basic, though? Like they weren’t exactly the type of illegibly sophisticated egregores that trads like to worship? Isn’t Tall_poppy_syndrome basically instinctive?
Many of the countermeasures are allergies against specific things. If a Catholic ascends to some position and then fires non-Catholics and promotes Catholics, observers are prepared to notice this and argue it’s violating freedom of religion / using religion for something that it shouldn’t be used for in civil society. But if someone whose ‘religion’ is environmentalism ascends to the same position and fires non-environmentalists and promotes environmentalists, the same allergies might not fire in response. I can’t easily imagine a phrase that’s “freedom of X” that captures not being able to fire someone because they’re not an environmentalist, and this means that if ‘religion’ morphs with the times the defenses posed by ‘freedom of religion’ might not morph with them, and we might end up back in the bad state.
Hmm. Perhaps if there were a consensus that some people have deep, sincere, sometimes metaphysical reasons for not being environmentalists, they could become a protected class. I’m not sure many people do, myself.