The longing for religio
I’m yearning for a better story that connects me with others and weaves my life within a larger Telos (without believing new age crap). And it seems that I’m not alone.
We are enjoying higher living standards than ever globally (e.g. as Steven Pinker argues). Yet there are increasing reports of chronic anxiety and depression, isolation, and meaninglessness. It seems clear that material comfort is not enough, many are yearning for more. A point in case is the huge upsurge in interest in online philosophers, from the “Peterson-mania” to Vervaeke’s “awakening from the meaning crisis” and the emergence of “digital campfires” like the Stoa.
All of these online thinkers are groping at the same elephant from a different angle: Religion. In its broadest understanding, the term’s etymology Religio means to bind together. It’s the social connection that seems missing in today’s day and age.
In this piece, we’ll explore how our global consumerist culture can be seen as a butchered attempt at religion, and how that may have contributed to our current “crisis bonanza”. We then outline what an adequate new religion would need to solve.
This series of articles is not an attempt to “create” a new religion (I’m not that mad). Rather than being dictated top down, we can only hope that the religion of tomorrow will emerge and evolve bottom up. Religion seems to be very much like language, and we’ve seen plenty of failed top-down invented “better” languages as well as religions, from Esperanto to the Cult of the Supreme Being. The aim is to explore what a functioning religion of tomorrow would need to provide and what pieces from traditional religion could be included.
How religion ties together society
It’s easy to discard “religion” altogether when it is understood merely as superstitious adherence to conventions of a holy book, as the “new atheists” have shown. Yes, an all-powerful, all-benevolent creator reigning from the heavens does seem like a childish projection of a father figure. Shitting on SkyDaddy may be fun and allow detached analytical types to feel superior, but it’s cheap to dunk on a strawman.
“God” likely wasn’t considered “supernatural” in most cultures, rather as the very essence of nature, the creative process or any natural force that much exceeds the power of humans. Concepts such as “money”, “nation”, and “individual” may seem just as superstitious and silly to future generations.
A more interesting framing of religion is to view it as the fabric that ties society together. And what tied traditional societies of a distant past together obviously won’t be able to take on that role today. However, weaving this shared social fabric of religion may be the only way we know of to organise society past the Dunbar number. A broader definition of religion would also include our stories about technology, art, nation states, etc. Geertz defines religion as a “system of symbols which acts to establish pervasive and long-lasting moods and motivations in society”.
Any widely shared beliefs, stories, and practices could be conceived of as religious in this broader definition that we are considering here. From trust in the institution of science to the story of progress through globalisation to the ritual of accepting printed paper for goods - it’s all religious in this broader framing.
Layman Pascal proposes that religion is fundamentally about the harmonisation and integration of culture, technology, politics, etc. at a given time and place. If this religious integration is successful, it results in an excess of meaning and coherence that can translate into a numinous experience that binds communities together. From this point of view, religion stops seeming like an antiquated mode of superstition. Rather, the emergence of a religion that creates a right integration and surplus coherence for our times suddenly seems like an urgent priority.
Globalist religion: Human, Science, and Capital
Old Friedrich declared the death of God more than 140 years ago. And the damn corps has been rotting for so long that we can no longer ignore the stench. As social animals that relate to the world and each other through justifications, it seems like we need a narrative that gives purpose to our lives. Yet more and more find it impossible to believe the silly dogmas of the cultural fossils we generally call “religion”, or to participate in their dead rituals. This is neither an apology for ancient superstitions nor an attempt to resurrect Skydaddy, but we have to admit that there is a gaping hole that these relics used to fill for our ancestors.
Alexander Bard asserts that we are inherently tribal and religious and that our reaching for a unifying mythos is non-negotiable, even automatic. Even if God is dead, we can’t help but create a new one, even if unconsciously.
Modern society was never atheist, it just pushed its pantheon into the unconscious, glossed it over with science, money, and status - subconsciously worshipping Gucci God and Mammon.
Some might argue that Capital has become our new God - a delicious throwback to the biblical golden calf. A more encompassing diagnosis would be that we ourselves have taken on the role of God in the advent of humanism. Anthropos on the throne, Mammon (Capital & markets) to his right, and Scientia to her left. Seems fitting, since humans are now literally the force shaping our planet (Anthropocene, etc.). Homo Deus wields weapons many orders of magnitude more powerful than what the Gods of old could dream of. Little Boy makes Thor’s hammer and Zeus’ lightning look like Nerf guns. Armageddon is just an autocrat with a big red button away.
As Daniel Schmachtenberger diagnosed astutely, a civilization with godly power but lacking in wisdom will self-terminate inexorably. And even if we don’t blow ourselves up, we will eventually degrade the very substrate we depend on in our mindless strive for (economic) growth and progress, as mandated by the archangels of consumerist humanism.
Our unconscious global religion not only fails to put us in right relationship with each other and the planet, but it also can’t answer our call for meaning. We are left trapped in a state of the Absurd - feeling atomized, alienated, and nihilistic.
A more adequate religion could at once provide the mythos needed to not blow ourselves up and at the same time answer our yearning for personal and collective meaning.
The crisis of our times
We are stuck in a multi-dimensional, ontology-crossing, fractal mega pickle of a crisis. The tricky part about this crisis is that it plays out both in the world out there (from climate change to nuclear risk) and in our subjective experience (lack of meaning). Even though they are interconnected, it makes sense to look at each distinctly to help make the issues more tractable. The Meta Crisis (external) and the Meaning Crisis (internal).
The Meta Crisis: Dystopias or catastrophes
Climate change, inequality, and other issues are interconnected and growing more complex each day. Schmachtenberger’s core insight is that there is a common generator function behind all of these seemingly distinct crises: coordination failure in multipolar traps. Overuse of the commons, arms races, and the failure of international agreements all share the same basic game theory.
Technology is oil on the fire of this already precarious situation: Our current social tech makes us more distracted, divided, and confused, reducing our ability to act wisely. The degradation of the info-sphere is upstream of any solution to any of the other crises. At the same time, every new exponential technology that comes online adds another potential catastrophic failure into the mix (see Bostrom’s vulnerable world hypothesis).
For those reasons, the obvious attractor that would fix both the increased risks possible at an ever smaller scale and the inability for collective sensemaking is a top-down control regime with ubiquitous AI-powered surveillance (similar to what we see emerging in China at the moment).
As the graphic above by Peter Limberg illustrates, we are aiming for a third attractor that isn’t catastrophe or dystopia. Considering the framing of religion as the harmonization and integration of a culture’s values, politics, art, technology, etc. is in fact the search for this third attractor.
The religion of tomorrow needs to resolve these existential issues and falls short if it does not address these coordination failures at the root cause. Because all of these issues are global in nature, we need a religion of global scope. Returning humans to their proper place as the nervous system of Gaia instead of cancer eating away at the very substrate that sustains it.
The meaning crisis: why life doesn’t make sense anymore
In addition to these “objective” crises, we are facing a “subjective” crisis of meaning. From Marx to Byung-Chul Han, the persistent alienation and atomization of “modern man” has been diagnosed to death without being able to shift us out of the predicament. Whether we call it “left brain chauvinism” (McGilchrist etc.) or the “tyranny of the propositional” (Vervaeke), there seems to be something off at the very core of our culture. Vervaeke’s work is probably the most complete in outlining an actual solution: The process of relevance realization, if liberated from parasitic processing, can return us to a multi-modal connectedness to the world around us and one another. All 4 kinds of knowing need to be honed in ecologies of practices to afford an “optimal grip” on reality characterized by flow and insight cascades. Yes, that’s a bunch of dense jargon but it’s been talked to death elsewhere.
Looking for a better religion of tomorrow
That more adequate religion could be described in many ways: the “religion of tomorrow” or “post-metaphysical religion”. I will use “Metamodern Religion” because of the connotations that come with the term: a cultural shift that integrates prior modes and a superposition of sincerity and irony (more on why that’s crucial in forthcoming articles).
Metamodern Religion needs to provide ecologies of practices that can return us to the right relationship with each other and the world and protect us from intersubjective parasites.
Together with the external crisis described above, we can then conclude that Metamodern Religion faces the Herculean task of resolving both the Meta Crisis and the Meaning Crisis. I think a genuine religion of our time would resolve our most pressing issues both internally and externally.
In summary, we note the following requirements for Metamodern Religion:
It needs to provide a sense of personal and shared meaning. This includes moral and ontological frameworks that provide orientation in the world.
Its narratives should be able to tie into previous religious views while updating them with our latest scientific understandings. The unifying narrative should allow for significantly different interpretations, practices, and ways of living without losing coherence and fragmenting into competing sects.
Existential risk needs to be directly addressed, from climate catastrophe and ecocide to nuclear proliferation and the dangers of rogue AI. Ideally, it would address the “generator function” of these issues, resolving all classes of coordination failures such as multipolar traps and the tragedy of the commons.
Psycho-technologies and ecologies of practice need to be built in to allow for personal and collective transformation. We will likely need a large portfolio of techniques that is applied selectively depending on cultural and personal circumstances.
Last but not least, it should prevent the failure modes of previous religions, including weaponization for controlling the population and petrification into outdated dogma.
In forthcoming articles, I’ll look at what we can learn from traditional religions and what might be rescued from them. I will even foolishly imagine what a structure with such a grandiose aim could possibly look like, stay tuned.