The False Promise of a Return to Tradition and Religion

Jordan Peterson is against political correctness, opposed to the hegemony of feminist standpoint theories on university campuses and favors free speech generally. For that reason and that reason alone he is an ally and should be supported. It's well past time for a reckoning with the pseudo-academic left, the feminist and critical race theorists especially. They simply must accede to demands for ideological pluralism on college campuses and in society in general. Play nice or get out of the sandbox. Simple as that.

That said, he has an appeal to the neoreactionary crowd and there are reasons for this that go beyond their shared dislike of the dogmatic intersectional left, that are embedded in his outlook and the things he chooses to emphasize in his lectures. Ideas that, if left unchecked, can and in the not so distant past certainly have rivaled the current regressive left in the danger they pose to the very ideologically pluralistic social order that Peterson otherwise so loudly professes to uphold.

In particular, his approach to the writings of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, and their apparent warnings that the philosophical "death of God" would eventually lead to nihilism and/or the seduction of some or another kind of totalitarianism. The idea that "a man who loses his people and his national roots also loses the faith of his fathers and his God" as Dostoevsky puts it. Such a man then becomes a sitting duck either for existential angst and nihilistic despair, or the the appeal of a surrogate religion, in the form of a dogmatic ideology. In any event, the death of God narrative describes a concomitant decline in public morality, the dissolution of the family, falling birth rates necessitating mass immigration that drives still further levels of social disintegration until eventually, society is irrevocably changed and not for the better. This is the central narrative of much neoreactionary thought, the "theonomist" branch especially.

While not something that can be proven absolutely, the idea that a decline in religiosity coincides with a rise in nihilism and/or ideological dogmatism does strike me as being highly plausible. The similarities of fascism and communism with religions has been remarked upon repeatedly. More recently, I've been directly privy to the rise in popularity of the "new atheism" online, and the resultant decline in religiosity among millennials. That this generation subsequently embraced tumblr SJW feminism with the fervency that it has did not, therefore, come as a surprise to me. Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and company successfully debunked Christian dogmas in the minds of many, but did not address the underlying need for transcendent belief systems that some people, at least, seem to have. Jordan Peterson would seem to be following in Carl Jung's footsteps - quite intentionally - in pointing this out. And good on him for doing so. 

I should also reiterate the fact that Jordan Peterson does not advocate any branch of neoreactionary or far right thought, near as I can tell. He has delivered scathing attacks on fundamentalist and ultra-nationalist thought that should make clear that his views are more nuanced than his leftist detractors make them out to be.

But his efforts should come with a warning label of their own. Attributing nihilism or the emergence of murderous totalitarianism ultimately to atheism has enormous potential to imply a "solution" that actually exacerbates the core problem. If "killing" God had (and continues to have) unforeseen and potentially disastrous consequences, so too might resurrecting and re-enthroning him. Specifically, the lure of a return to political religion, ultra-nationalism or some kind of traditionalism. This is the notion that underwrites neoreaction, and it's false and highly dangerous, since it ends up simply being another version of the murderous totalitarianisms that Dostoevsky fears will replace religion. The "God" chosen by whichever movement manages to do this (and which religion is chosen and how it prevails over its rivals never seems to get discussed) thus becomes, with no shortage of irony, just one more of the "demons" that names Dostoevsky's work that tackles precisely this issue.

Getting back to the religion and tradition of the past has been tried. Many times, and its rate of success is equivalent to that of the communism that it is touted as an antidote to. It was tried in Iran in 1979 and Afghanistan in 1996, to name two examples. The men who brought down the World Trade Center towers were motivated by precisely those kinds of ideals. So too have been numerous abortion clinic bombings and similar acts of domestic terrorism. There's been an ongoing push to bring religion back into public life in red state America since the inauguration of Ronald Reagan. Hasn't been much of "an antidote to chaos" if you ask me. By all appearances, it's made things worse, not better. 

The Antidote to Chaos?

The counterpart to Dostoevsky in predicting where the "resurrection of God" could well take us would be Canadian author Margaret Atwood. Her vision doesn't look terribly appealing to me.  Historically, the Crusades, the European Wars of Religion in the 1600s, the bloodbath that was the Chinese Taiping Rebellion, clerical fascism in Europe, the religious right in America, and ongoing Islamic Jihadist terrorism should dispel us of any notion that religion confers any special immunity to widespread social chaos, oppression and tyranny. The religious identity that lies at the heart of sacred forms of nationalist identity is never anything timeless and eternal, but decided at some point in the past by affairs that were - for their time - no less bloody and chaotic than the great wars of the 20th century. 

Don't misunderstand me, dear reader. If you find solace in a church or mosque, don't let me dissuade you from any of that. Plus, in the interests of fairness, the assertions made by atheists that religion is actually the root of the problem are likewise wrong and dangerous, as the persecution of religious groups in the USSR and its satellites and copy-cats exemplifies. God is neither the problem nor the solution here. The human propensity towards solving problems of identity, meaning and purpose with fanaticism and dogmatism in belief systems is the problem, and this tendency applies with equally deadly results to religious, identitarian or ideological systems of thought.

My quarrel is not with religion per-se, but with the proposal that a universal return to religion as the core of public life and a concomitant social order of serene small towns and suburbs filled with simple, moralistic nuclear families with traditional gender role churchgoing folk will be good for what ails us. It's the right wing counterpart to the romantic infatuation with communal and egalitarian living that has haunted the left for centuries. The core problem is that the entirety of society will not do either voluntarily. So the tried-and-true building blocks of tyranny: dependency on leaders and dogmas, demonization of outsiders and dissidents, erosion of privacy and civil liberties and good old fashioned brute force will end up having to be trotted out should either of these options be attempted in earnest. 

And that's the real reason why the decline of religion led to the problems that Nietzsche and Dostoevsky predicted that it would. It's not religion specifically and exclusively that confers identity and purpose, and keeps the social order intact, it's collectively held belief systems more generally. When these change dramatically or collapse all together, private angst and social chaos accompany the greater personal liberty that also emerges as a result.  The implosion of communism in the east bloc countries was similarly devastating to at least certain portions of their populations, which doubtlessly explains why authoritarianism is making a comeback in nearly all of them. 

While the SJW movement in the west does need to be stopped, and social alienation is a real problem, we'd do well to think long and hard before putting our efforts behind a revival of public, political religion as a means of solving our social ills. It's easy to forget that the regressive left of our time began in large part as a reaction against the religious right. Better to get rid of both than to make a preference of one over the other.

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The New Atheism: When Bertrand Russell Met Lenin Once Again

The "new" atheism - a misnomer, really - emerged into the mainstream in the early 2000s with the publication of such works as The End of Faith by Sam Harris, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens.  It was not really new in the sense that they were not saying anything that Bertrand Russell hadn't said back in the 1920s, and other philosophers before even him.

What was new was how this early 21st century wave of atheism used the internet to take the American cultural scene by storm.  The net was dominated by a younger, more libertarian cohort, and they were getting ever angrier and more frustrated with the Christian conservative Bush white house.  It wasn't just Bush's policies that drove their bitterness, but rather his facade of down-home folksiness, exemplified by his intentional mispronunciations of words.  These new atheist authors found a receptive audience in these social media pioneers, for whom the problems America, and indeed the world, were facing were reducible to too much church attendance among red state Americans.

The Meme of Legends

These new atheists did indeed make a convincing deconstruction of evangelical Christian doctrines, and their propensity to mop the floor with Christians in online flame wars became the subject of memes.  The case they make against the inerrancy of scripture is convincing.  Personally, I was never really convinced by them, however.  Not fully.  While this argument drove online atheists crazy, I was among those who thought of them as their own sort of evangelists.  I didn't trust the degree of importance they attached to the nonbelief in God, as if that was what made or broke a person morally or intellectually.  Funny how alike their mirror image fundamentalist rivals they were in that respect.

I didn't trust how eager so many of them were to pronounce as fact something they could not prove - the nonexistence of God, despite their constant insistence on smoking gun evidence for God's existence from their religious opponents.  The implication that all the world's problems could be laid at the feet of belief in Christian dogmas struck me as absurdly reductionist. Bertrand Russell became aware of the fact that God-belief wasn't the real root of the problem after meeting Lenin in 1920, and becoming extremely put off by Lenin's fanatical devotion to a decidedly non religious ideology.  My direct experience with Bush era internet atheists was that they were staunchly unwilling to learn from Russell's experience.  Talk to them of the terrors of the Soviet anti-religious campaigns or the Red Chinese invasion of Tibet and cultural revolution, and I was universally admonished - especially by female liberal atheists - to stop sounding like such a McCarthyite Republican.

Their experience with religion seemed limited to the conservative, evangelical Bush presidency and was defined entirely by being opposed to abortion and gay marriage.  I was no friend to religious conservatism either, and had not been since the Satanic Panic of the 1980s wherein I was accused of devil worship on account of listening to heavy metal music and playing Dungeons and Dragons.  But after having read Bertrand Russell, Eric Hoffer and others who'd done deeper research into the nature of belief and fanaticism, it seemed to me as though the new atheists were hamstrung by a decidedly one dimensional take on spiritual concerns.  Although some of them had even read works by Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, many atheists I knew online and in real life seemed to not grasp that side of human nature that was drawn towards the mythical, the poetic and the spiritual.

Increasingly, online atheism came to be about smugness, wittiness, signalling, sarcasm, posturing, decidedly anti-holy holier than thou-ness, and just how much smarter they all were than those stupid religious rubes, inbreeding in the Ozarks, or the like.  Being considered a good person was measurable by the correctness of one's beliefs and one's politics.  The smug scenester mindset that I'd seen among my counter-culture acquaintances in high school was there all over again, except it was religious incorrectness rather than listening to the wrong kind of music that would get you snubbed by the very same people who claimed to despise preppy snobbery.  There was no room at the table for people who believed in sky daddies, invisible pink unicorns or flying spaghetti monsters.  He who fought with monsters was not taking care, and gazing altogether too long into the abyss.

I disliked religious intolerance, of course, but much more the intolerance than the religious.  Especially when said intolerance was becoming increasingly agenda-driven and ideologically ego-stroking and self serving.  Most anti-religious liberals were decidedly unwilling to take on Islam, for instance, long before Maajid Nawaz called out regressive leftism.  Associations of anti-Islamism with racism were not invented by Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign. It was old hat even then.  Censorship and sexual prudishness were only wrong when the Catholic Church and southern evangelicals were doing it.  When radical feminists and college campuses were doing it, you were obviously an anti-gay, anti-abortion Bush loving republican for even daring to say such a thing.  Clerical celibacy was just oh, so unnatural, but separatist radical feminism was heroic resistance against the patriarchy.

This was my experience from 2006 onwards.  What would come to be called the SJWs and the Regressive Left were, as popular concepts, years away still.  But the foundations had already long been laid and set.  The hypocrisy on the left that drove me to abandon progressivism in the late 1990s after reading Warren Farrell's Myth of Male Power only seemed to be intensifying.

Thus, when donglegate happened, and Elevatorgate happened, and Atheism+ happened, the new atheists were a lot more surprised than I was.  Descriptions of the debacle that was atheism+ in this 2013 article in Atheist Revolution now seem quaintly humorous in their familiarity.  Postmodern intersectional 3rd wave feminism: Like Seinfeld, classic Star Trek or the music of the Beatles, it's easy to forget that a much younger and less worldly you actually experienced it for the first time:

"On August 19, 2012, blogger Jen McCreight unleashed "Atheism+" upon unsuspecting atheists around the world, and some would say our community has been divided ever since."

"Still others were turned off by the manner in which Atheism+ quickly became an "us vs. them" endeavor that seemed to be more about branding, self-promotion, and purging the atheist community of those who were not liked by those who decided to promote Atheism+ than it did about social justice."

"I was wrong about most atheists valuing skepticism and critical thinking. I would soon realize that many atheists were not skeptics or critical thinkers, at least not when it came to some aspects of their ideology. Unfortunately, I discovered I was wrong by observing the behavior of many of the most vocal supporters of Atheism+. They demonstrated little willingness to think critically or skeptically about the particular form of feminism that seemed to be at the center of their worldview."

"Because Atheism+ was righteous, those who offered criticism were not just people who disagreed; they were bad people. In order to be a valued member of the community, one needed to be the right kind of feminist."

And this, the canary in the coal mine gone silent even in 2013:

"Social justice tends to emphasize human rights, making it more inclusive than the particular issues Jen listed after it. For example, social justice efforts have long focused on the plight of the poor. This was nowhere to be found on Jen's list."

You don't say!

The moment I had been hoping for since 1992, when I read Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale - when a substantial portion of liberals would catch on to the fact that the postmodern progressivism of which the new atheism was a part, and Christian conservatism were much more alike than different beneath their cultural veneers - finally seemed to happen in the later part of 2014.  The tone of the discussion had finally shifted.  Bill Maher and Sam Harris were squaring off against Ben Affleck on Real Time, and a YouTuber calling himself the Amazing Atheist had finally found a punching bag he preferred to the Christian God in another YouTuber by the name of Anita Sarkeesian.

Once again, it seemed, Bertrand Russell had met Lenin, and was again unimpressed by what he saw.

About damn time.

What shall be our mythology?

Malhar Mali has some interesting things to say about "moral communities" in his interview with author James A. Lindsay before this blog entry descends into a morass of misinformed nonsense about Marxism.

I was looking for the generalization of religion that accounts for things like political parties or social movements.  What is the religion like thing, the one that's broader and yet that religions are all examples of?  What's the thing where groups behave like religions without necessarily being one?

He wanders into well trodden territory here; Eric Hoffer was reaching for a similar concept back in the 1950s when he wrote in what is, perhaps, the greatest treatise on political philosophy ever written, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements when he suggested that religions, nationalist movements and social revolutions were all interchangeable as far as his true believer was concerned.  For Eric Hoffer, precisely what was believed in was of lesser importance than the willingness of the True Believer to put absolute faith in it.

Particularly good was this observation/question that Mali put to Lindsay:

I would speculate that on the Left, religion has been on the decline.  Are people picking up these ideologically motivated moral communities such as social justice, 3rd wave feminism as substitutes?

 To which Lindsay gives the obviously correct answer of "Absolutely."  He goes on to describe "moral tribes" in the following terms:

This moral tribe idea is exactly what I was looking for; it's a moral community that has become ideologically invested.  It's taken its moral values and equipped them with sacredness, which is super high value - infinite value - according to the moral psychologist and professor of business ethics at New York University Jonathan Haidt.  Often, members have these "sacred" morals central to their core identity.  They think what makes them a good person is that they hold these values.

So there's every reason to believe that these people we are talking about - social justice warriors, they're often called - are acting in a way that is analogous, even isomorphic to religion. 

I've been saying this for a long time now.  The progressivism of the late 20th century mostly warmed over romanticism from the summer of love era, itself a reboot of a much older way of thinking that arose as a substitute for religion in the late 18th century.  The SJWs did not emerge in the second decade of the 21st century by accident.  What was needed was for iconoclastic anti-religious authors like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens to publish their withering deconstructions of religious - especially Christian - doctrine, undermining belief in God and religion.  Especially among younger, tech savvy libertarian minded people like those found in Silicon Valley and the early adopters of social media more generally.

The so called new atheism was, and could have been, only half successful.  They undermined the credibility of religion and faith, but seemed ignorant of man's deeper need for religion and faith.   If religion itself should fail, something else will step in and take its place.  Comparisons of communism and nazism with religions are old hat now, with no less a luminary than the present Pope Francis observing correctly that "Karl Marx didn't invent anything."  Indeed, ideas such as the community of goods and even the idea of "to each according to his need" have biblical precedent.  It has also been argued, not without merit, that millenarian cults and mystical anarchists of the middle ages interpreted the "prophecies of a final struggle between the hosts of Christ and Antichrist melded with the rootless poor's desire to improve their own material conditions." Simply add this to the Jacobin anti-clericalism of 18th century France and the rest is, as they say, history.

Let's face it: overarching narratives of good vs. evil are quite popular.  George Lucas openly admitted that he drew heavily from Joseph Campbell's exhaustive studies of mythology when he created Star Wars.  J.R.R Tolkien drew from a near bottomless well of European pagan mythology and Catholic doctrine (an odd pair) in his own now iconic mythology.  Indeed, it's hard not to see the entire fantasy genre, in literature, film and gaming, as being anything other than a postmodern revival of archetypal mythology.

This Manichean world view may well not be a human universal.  These tendencies in western thought were doubtlessly exacerbated by the nightmarish transformation of the best and brightest the modern west ever had to offer - 19th century German philosophy and romanticism, into the mind-bending nightmare of Germany in the 1930s and 40s.

But even there, Hitler was dealing in Manichean absolutes: the Aryan was pure and benevolent, the Jew was all that was evil.  Since then, I think that the appeal of a lot of our favorite pop-culture narratives (Lucas and Tolkien again, among others) is that they are, at least in part, a re-fighting of WW2.  Essential to successful myth, it would seem, is ritualized or metaphorical re-enactment of existential struggles what were won, but could have gone the other way, and would have if God, right, natural law, historical materialism or some other transcendent power for good not been on our side, and so made our victory inevitable.  For who else's side would supreme good be on?  More comforting to believe such notions than to face the existential dread invoked by the fact that these struggles were anything other than foregone conclusions.

In light of all of this, should it surprise us that these kinds of themes appear in our politics?  Richard Hofstadter's brilliant article on the Paranoid style certainly seems to think not, wherein adherents to one or another modern, secular equivalent to the millenarians see themselves as pitted against a "vast and sinister conspiracy," perceived as being a "demonic force of almost transcendent power."  This is central to the construction of the world view of a moral tribe.  Belief that some or another form of "social privilege" as an extension of a system of oppression so pervasive and evil that the ends of defeating it justify any means is the heart and soul of the SJW world view.  And a major factor in its rise and spread in a post-religious culture.

This is an important question for the emergent alt-left.  Especially given how rationalistic and enlightenment the alt-left tends to be.  Perhaps more important than the question of what shall be our political program is the question of what shall be our mythology?  I do not pose this question with the intent that we fabricate mythical explanations for scientifically understandable phenomena in the manner that religions do.  That was never what religion was really about, and failing to realize that was a failure far grander than all the success that the new atheism had in debunking God belief.

In asking what shall be our mythology, I ask what is the good that we fight for and the evil that we fight against?  Is this struggle significant enough for people to devote themselves to it and find meaning in it?  I defy anyone to find a successful political movement in history that did not pose this question to itself.  If not intellectually, at least instinctively.

A mythologized world view is not without its dangers.  It can all too easily descend into a morass of self righteousness, dogma, demonization of out-groups and puritanism.  Precisely what happened to the SJWs.  Given that cool headed enlightenment rationalism is, I think, the alt-left's greatest virtue, to descend into such fever swamps ourselves would be tragic.  But without some sort of heroic narrative, world views fail to engage people on more emotional levels and fail to tap into that eternal wellspring of archetype that so galvanizes human action, especially collectively, to a degree that makes real change possible.  As such, we're playing with fire here, and it's easy to lose control of it and get burned.  But not playing with fire would have resulted in mankind never getting out of the stone age.