I do want to make a quick point of clarification: I could have given a nearly identical talk that cited Bostrom and the Sequences instead of Schmitt and the New Testament. It really depends on the audience, but people who think seriously about big issues, whether from a mostly-religious or mostly-secular standpoint, will often end up worrying about the same things. One reason the presentation was so religiously inflected was that we were at a conference in honor of a Christian thinker, named after a Bible verse, held at The Catholic University of America, featuring a memorial mass. When in Rome...
One of those big issues is: it's persistently easy to extrapolate current trends and imagine the end of the world, and yet the world stubbornly refuses to end. This feels like a modern concern, a very post-1945 worry, but a 19th-century person could worry about revolutions in Europe and European imperialism everywhere else; in the 17th century, you could reasonable wonder if there would be something even more viral than the Reformation that might have an even higher body count than the Thirty Years War. The further back you go, the more "end of the world" has to make sense in light of whose world you're talking about—but the ancient Romans could worry that the Roman World would collapse because of barbarian invasions, and a few centuries earlier countries throughout the Mediterranean could worry about the Romans doing to them what Rome worried that the barbarians would do to *them*.
The secular/anthropological view of religions is that they're memetically competitive; there is some reason that Christianity outcompeted Hellenic paganism, that Islam beat the various polytheisms of the Arabian peninsula, that Judaism has survived for thousands of years despite repeated existential threats. So we can view religious concerns about the apocalypse/katechon as something that's likely to be important. (It could be what Gould calls a "spandrel," i.e. a kind of pointless evolutionary feature that wasn't costly enough to be bred out, but the Bayesian bet is that it matters).
So what we wanted to do was to talk about what causes apocalypse (Christian speak for x-risk) and what leads to Safety (katechon!). Technology is, increasingly, the primary contender for both. I do view AI as more katechonic than not; it's magnifying human potential in important, helpful ways and we ought to build on that quickly.
On a last note, I think it's good to be able to code-shift between a secular and religious framework for understanding issues that both sides care about. (Be careful, though! I was a secular person who could talk in religious terms before I was religious.) It will be increasingly important to think this way because of demographics. Look at the behavior of secular people—moving to high cost-of-living cities, spending years in higher education, deferring or avoiding having kids because of a general sense of doom. If somebody were forcing nonbelievers to do this, rather than them doing it to themselves, you wouldn't be wrong in calling it a form of ethnic cleansing. So, over time, more middle-class educated people will be religious because the secular populations are mostly not having enough kids to keep up. I don't emphasize my personal religious views that much in public, mostly because I don't think I'm an especially exemplary Christian; it's a whole lot easier to be a morally-consistent and righteous atheist (at least outside of deathbeds and foxholes). But it is an important part of my worldview.
Hello Sergey, The conference was on René Girard, but you don't say much about him. I looked around to see what people say.
The "scapegoat mechanism," seems to be at the core of Girard's model of social dynamics. Girard observed that scapegoating is the ultimate craft of statesmanship. Many statements attributed to Girard are hard to make out exactly what he wanted to say. Maybe these examples are outside of context, but within the context they could be even more befuddling. I read paragraphs of abstract material that really say little or nothing to me. Here are a few examples.
✓Religion humanizes violence; it protects man from his own violence by taking it out of his hands.
✓Ignorance is constructive because it purges man of the suspicions that would poison his existence if he were to remain conscious of the crisis.
✓Men would not be able to shake loose the violence between them, to make of it a separate entity both sovereign and redemptory, without a surrogate victim.
✓Violence will come to an end only after it has had the last word, and that word has been accepted as divine.
✓Religion protects man as long as its ultimate foundations are not revealed.
✓The only barrier against human violence is raised on misconception.
✓The well-adjusted person is thus one who conceals his violent impulses and condones the collective’s concealment of them. The "maladjusted" individual cannot tolerate this concealment.
✓Psychic catastrophes misunderstood by the psychoanalyst result from an inchoate, obstinate reaction against the violence and falsehood found in human society.
___________
Of course, we can see "scapegoating" everywhere we look, on all levels of society, and throughout time. That practice is the basis of racism, which is the needed explanation to cast the "other" down. Girard suggests these incidents might be the product of blood-feuds; which are then resolved by the scapegoating? America has been in some contentious periods, (I could probably say when and why). Then they scapegoated Iraq. Did that calm the waters on the home front? Where does this theory take hold and produce results?
He forwards the idea that RITUAL SACRIFICE is a cultural universal like marriage or gender. We still have marriage and gender, but is there any ritual sacrifice in your life? Are you searching for a scapegoat so that you can get along better with your neighbor? (Maybe it's the neighbor's dog that is the scapegoat, because he barks too much.) Girard also speaks of, "the uniquely human propensity for vengeance that must have destroyed many early societies". Is that an Assertion or an Axiom?
There is vengeance in the world, and it is sold as a necessary part of justice in our scriptures. Girard says, "A pattern, points to an INSTINCT, that leads a society in crisis to pick a scapegoat and direct their accumulated hostility towards that chosen individual or subgroup". Where does the INSTINCT part come in? Is there a definition about that, or a process revealed of how it formed? Or is it another Axiom
What is the definition of a "blood-feud", and where does it come from. Or is it that it just exists?
To look at an ancient ethos and notice there was a lot of killing, isn't any breakthrough. (I could probably explain it in another way. And I have studied ancient history). And then to claim that these taboos and sacrifices solved problems and kept the society together, is a giant leap. All the other societies that did the same killing and collapsed, aren't in the formula. It is a cognitive blind-spot called survivor-ship bias.
Some like David Deutsch says that good explanations have "reach." Reach is not depth. Just because something was widely practiced, doesn't tell you where it came from, why it persists, and what changes could put-it-away.
Gerard finds many scapegoats all throughout Europe, for 1,000's of years. These are all well-known. So he postulates that the mechanism might be a sort of VESTIGIAL ORGAN that gets reactivated in situations of societal chaos? That one is a whopper.
Then we hear of Deutsch's alternative: that theories come from human creativity, which only LATER are tested through the crucible of real-world data. Better to ask if CREATIVITY isn't actually a leaning toward the PERSONAL ADVANTAGE of my sponsor, (he who pays my salary for spinning these thoughts). That is clearly the way of the present-day-narratives.
Maybe you can tell that I didn't find what I learned about Girard's theory too convincing. I also reject the three kinds of thought modeling as the only ones, "conceptual reasoning," "ethical reasoning," and “affiliational thinking."
IMO, If you would define all the language that Girard used, a bit deeper and in non-western terms, you would surely arrive at a different conclusion.
Hello Sergey, It is somewhat difficult to comment on your post, when you say in a conference, I attended 4-5 talks. (I didn't attend those talks, so what can I say?)
Somehow the apocalypse and the Anti-Christ get tied together. Are Christians trying to lay claim of ownership to end-times? Thiel did define the Anti-Christ as (a totalitarian world government that kills progress), and that the way for us to tread that path is… To go to church? What will we find when we get there? “The Apocalypse is obviously going to happen, because the Bible says so".
I view it FIRST as; the biblical prophesies were written because that is what the ancient Hebrews were already doing, Genociding one people after another. (There are so many Bible verses that go on and on about that.) And then, when these things were written in the scriptures, what a prefect justification to keep doing it.
SECOND: About the end times predicted in the Bible, I believe (I see it), that both Zionists and Christians are doing everything possible to make those prophecies come true. They are not out fighting to save the world. Their every act is toward destroying all of society. Of any others and even our own. Anyone who even says "eschatological" should be dressed in a "wrap-around" white coat, and shot full of the most calming drugs. Let's look at a few Christian premises: (BTW, I would be a fool to allow anyone's claim that I should propose an alternative.) So sorry.
Example, So observes William James: God, being the first cause, ✓possesses existence per se; ✓He is necessary and absolute, ✓unlimited, ✓infinitely perfect, ✓one and only, ✓spiritual, ✓immutable, ✓eternal, ✓omnipotent, ✓omniscient, ✓omnipresent. This is an impressive philological parade, but it gets one no nearer to an understanding of God. It is all high-level (meaningless) abstractions. Not one of these words has one scintilla, or even one molecule of reality in it.
I think these premises, along with one ones I've written below, are not understandable. (Is it a "faith thing" then?) Maybe some of your followers that have more Christian understanding, can explain them. Or explain them away?
Aside from that which we know, Christianity is much more than just being, nice-to-each-other. There are some specific tenants that are fundamental for Christianity to be a working system. A noted Christian authority, Francis Schaeffer, gives these 14 statements that are essential to Christianity. These came from the last chapter in Escape from Reason. (If there is repetition, that is the way that he wrote it.)
1. The Bible is the only system in religion and philosophy that answers the question of why an individual can do what everyone should do—that is, to start with himself.
2. You can't start with anything other than yourself, because everyone passes everything through this “prism”.
3. The Bible asserts, that the eternal-and-infinitely-personal God created everything.
4. Everything that exists is the patrimony of being "personal", and not impersonal.
5. Further, the Bible says that God created all things outside of Himself, from nothing. The words “outside of Oneself" most clearly explains the nature of creation.
6. We do not mean the created in the sense of its extension from God, but that God's being and meaning in no way flow outwards. (My Comment, There is nothing outward from an infinite God by definition. Or, everything is outward from God, if God is strictly “Nothing”.)
7. There is a God—a personal and eternal God. He created everything outside of Himself. So, the universe comes from a truly personal beginning. Also, Nature was created from a personal, not an impersonal beginning.
8. The Bible says that in the course of a significant story, God created man in a special way, in His Own image and likeness. (Understanding that the main kinship of the human person resides at the top), the Bible says that man is created in the “image” of the divine personality, it's the reference point that appears.
9. Without having (or believing in) this God, a person would be a product of the impersonal + time + chance. No one has yet managed to show how time + chance can transform the impersonal into the personal.
10. Arguing here that people can start with themselves and come to comprehend the meaning of life: According to the Christian approach, a man created in the image of God can begin with himself, but not as a mortal, but as a divine person; and one more important circumstance — God gives fallen man the essential knowledge that he so desperately lacks. (It is all written in the Bible and easily accessible).
11. The Bible does not expound incoherent thoughts. The system that the Bible represents has a beginning, and from this beginning biblical thought develops consistently. The beginning is the idea that, "God is "personal-infinite", and the Creator of Everything that exists".
12. Christianity’s first proposition is that there are established, unchangeable facts, or TRUTHS. “Everything flows, and everything changes” — but that is NOT said about these TRUTHS. These truths are the backbone of the Christian system, remove them, and the Christian creed will be reborn as a mutation, or be stillborn.
13. We must understand that we exist in a constantly changing historical situation, and when going to proclaim the Good News to people, (missionaries), it is important to have an idea of the ups and downs of the modern way of thinking. Without having a clear idea of this, the unchangeable-truths of the Christian creed will enter into one ear and go out of the other ear of the listener.
14. The bible is not a game of the mind and it is not a subject for discussion. Its content should interest not only scientists. In truth, it is crucial for everyone who thinks about the Christian gospel.
I could say a lot about each one of these premises, but much is dependent on continuous paradox, self-created by words used at cross purposes. How to maul a language. The other part of Religion that I will not consider here, is that this befuddlement makes you feel good.
Since this is a complex post, I would like to talk about Girard. But I do not want to overstay my welcome.
Thanks for attending the talk!
I do want to make a quick point of clarification: I could have given a nearly identical talk that cited Bostrom and the Sequences instead of Schmitt and the New Testament. It really depends on the audience, but people who think seriously about big issues, whether from a mostly-religious or mostly-secular standpoint, will often end up worrying about the same things. One reason the presentation was so religiously inflected was that we were at a conference in honor of a Christian thinker, named after a Bible verse, held at The Catholic University of America, featuring a memorial mass. When in Rome...
One of those big issues is: it's persistently easy to extrapolate current trends and imagine the end of the world, and yet the world stubbornly refuses to end. This feels like a modern concern, a very post-1945 worry, but a 19th-century person could worry about revolutions in Europe and European imperialism everywhere else; in the 17th century, you could reasonable wonder if there would be something even more viral than the Reformation that might have an even higher body count than the Thirty Years War. The further back you go, the more "end of the world" has to make sense in light of whose world you're talking about—but the ancient Romans could worry that the Roman World would collapse because of barbarian invasions, and a few centuries earlier countries throughout the Mediterranean could worry about the Romans doing to them what Rome worried that the barbarians would do to *them*.
The secular/anthropological view of religions is that they're memetically competitive; there is some reason that Christianity outcompeted Hellenic paganism, that Islam beat the various polytheisms of the Arabian peninsula, that Judaism has survived for thousands of years despite repeated existential threats. So we can view religious concerns about the apocalypse/katechon as something that's likely to be important. (It could be what Gould calls a "spandrel," i.e. a kind of pointless evolutionary feature that wasn't costly enough to be bred out, but the Bayesian bet is that it matters).
So what we wanted to do was to talk about what causes apocalypse (Christian speak for x-risk) and what leads to Safety (katechon!). Technology is, increasingly, the primary contender for both. I do view AI as more katechonic than not; it's magnifying human potential in important, helpful ways and we ought to build on that quickly.
On a last note, I think it's good to be able to code-shift between a secular and religious framework for understanding issues that both sides care about. (Be careful, though! I was a secular person who could talk in religious terms before I was religious.) It will be increasingly important to think this way because of demographics. Look at the behavior of secular people—moving to high cost-of-living cities, spending years in higher education, deferring or avoiding having kids because of a general sense of doom. If somebody were forcing nonbelievers to do this, rather than them doing it to themselves, you wouldn't be wrong in calling it a form of ethnic cleansing. So, over time, more middle-class educated people will be religious because the secular populations are mostly not having enough kids to keep up. I don't emphasize my personal religious views that much in public, mostly because I don't think I'm an especially exemplary Christian; it's a whole lot easier to be a morally-consistent and righteous atheist (at least outside of deathbeds and foxholes). But it is an important part of my worldview.
Hello Sergey, The conference was on René Girard, but you don't say much about him. I looked around to see what people say.
The "scapegoat mechanism," seems to be at the core of Girard's model of social dynamics. Girard observed that scapegoating is the ultimate craft of statesmanship. Many statements attributed to Girard are hard to make out exactly what he wanted to say. Maybe these examples are outside of context, but within the context they could be even more befuddling. I read paragraphs of abstract material that really say little or nothing to me. Here are a few examples.
✓Religion humanizes violence; it protects man from his own violence by taking it out of his hands.
✓Ignorance is constructive because it purges man of the suspicions that would poison his existence if he were to remain conscious of the crisis.
✓Men would not be able to shake loose the violence between them, to make of it a separate entity both sovereign and redemptory, without a surrogate victim.
✓Violence will come to an end only after it has had the last word, and that word has been accepted as divine.
✓Religion protects man as long as its ultimate foundations are not revealed.
✓The only barrier against human violence is raised on misconception.
✓The well-adjusted person is thus one who conceals his violent impulses and condones the collective’s concealment of them. The "maladjusted" individual cannot tolerate this concealment.
✓Psychic catastrophes misunderstood by the psychoanalyst result from an inchoate, obstinate reaction against the violence and falsehood found in human society.
___________
Of course, we can see "scapegoating" everywhere we look, on all levels of society, and throughout time. That practice is the basis of racism, which is the needed explanation to cast the "other" down. Girard suggests these incidents might be the product of blood-feuds; which are then resolved by the scapegoating? America has been in some contentious periods, (I could probably say when and why). Then they scapegoated Iraq. Did that calm the waters on the home front? Where does this theory take hold and produce results?
He forwards the idea that RITUAL SACRIFICE is a cultural universal like marriage or gender. We still have marriage and gender, but is there any ritual sacrifice in your life? Are you searching for a scapegoat so that you can get along better with your neighbor? (Maybe it's the neighbor's dog that is the scapegoat, because he barks too much.) Girard also speaks of, "the uniquely human propensity for vengeance that must have destroyed many early societies". Is that an Assertion or an Axiom?
There is vengeance in the world, and it is sold as a necessary part of justice in our scriptures. Girard says, "A pattern, points to an INSTINCT, that leads a society in crisis to pick a scapegoat and direct their accumulated hostility towards that chosen individual or subgroup". Where does the INSTINCT part come in? Is there a definition about that, or a process revealed of how it formed? Or is it another Axiom
What is the definition of a "blood-feud", and where does it come from. Or is it that it just exists?
To look at an ancient ethos and notice there was a lot of killing, isn't any breakthrough. (I could probably explain it in another way. And I have studied ancient history). And then to claim that these taboos and sacrifices solved problems and kept the society together, is a giant leap. All the other societies that did the same killing and collapsed, aren't in the formula. It is a cognitive blind-spot called survivor-ship bias.
Some like David Deutsch says that good explanations have "reach." Reach is not depth. Just because something was widely practiced, doesn't tell you where it came from, why it persists, and what changes could put-it-away.
Gerard finds many scapegoats all throughout Europe, for 1,000's of years. These are all well-known. So he postulates that the mechanism might be a sort of VESTIGIAL ORGAN that gets reactivated in situations of societal chaos? That one is a whopper.
Then we hear of Deutsch's alternative: that theories come from human creativity, which only LATER are tested through the crucible of real-world data. Better to ask if CREATIVITY isn't actually a leaning toward the PERSONAL ADVANTAGE of my sponsor, (he who pays my salary for spinning these thoughts). That is clearly the way of the present-day-narratives.
Maybe you can tell that I didn't find what I learned about Girard's theory too convincing. I also reject the three kinds of thought modeling as the only ones, "conceptual reasoning," "ethical reasoning," and “affiliational thinking."
IMO, If you would define all the language that Girard used, a bit deeper and in non-western terms, you would surely arrive at a different conclusion.
.
Hello Sergey, It is somewhat difficult to comment on your post, when you say in a conference, I attended 4-5 talks. (I didn't attend those talks, so what can I say?)
Somehow the apocalypse and the Anti-Christ get tied together. Are Christians trying to lay claim of ownership to end-times? Thiel did define the Anti-Christ as (a totalitarian world government that kills progress), and that the way for us to tread that path is… To go to church? What will we find when we get there? “The Apocalypse is obviously going to happen, because the Bible says so".
I view it FIRST as; the biblical prophesies were written because that is what the ancient Hebrews were already doing, Genociding one people after another. (There are so many Bible verses that go on and on about that.) And then, when these things were written in the scriptures, what a prefect justification to keep doing it.
SECOND: About the end times predicted in the Bible, I believe (I see it), that both Zionists and Christians are doing everything possible to make those prophecies come true. They are not out fighting to save the world. Their every act is toward destroying all of society. Of any others and even our own. Anyone who even says "eschatological" should be dressed in a "wrap-around" white coat, and shot full of the most calming drugs. Let's look at a few Christian premises: (BTW, I would be a fool to allow anyone's claim that I should propose an alternative.) So sorry.
Example, So observes William James: God, being the first cause, ✓possesses existence per se; ✓He is necessary and absolute, ✓unlimited, ✓infinitely perfect, ✓one and only, ✓spiritual, ✓immutable, ✓eternal, ✓omnipotent, ✓omniscient, ✓omnipresent. This is an impressive philological parade, but it gets one no nearer to an understanding of God. It is all high-level (meaningless) abstractions. Not one of these words has one scintilla, or even one molecule of reality in it.
I think these premises, along with one ones I've written below, are not understandable. (Is it a "faith thing" then?) Maybe some of your followers that have more Christian understanding, can explain them. Or explain them away?
Aside from that which we know, Christianity is much more than just being, nice-to-each-other. There are some specific tenants that are fundamental for Christianity to be a working system. A noted Christian authority, Francis Schaeffer, gives these 14 statements that are essential to Christianity. These came from the last chapter in Escape from Reason. (If there is repetition, that is the way that he wrote it.)
1. The Bible is the only system in religion and philosophy that answers the question of why an individual can do what everyone should do—that is, to start with himself.
2. You can't start with anything other than yourself, because everyone passes everything through this “prism”.
3. The Bible asserts, that the eternal-and-infinitely-personal God created everything.
4. Everything that exists is the patrimony of being "personal", and not impersonal.
5. Further, the Bible says that God created all things outside of Himself, from nothing. The words “outside of Oneself" most clearly explains the nature of creation.
6. We do not mean the created in the sense of its extension from God, but that God's being and meaning in no way flow outwards. (My Comment, There is nothing outward from an infinite God by definition. Or, everything is outward from God, if God is strictly “Nothing”.)
7. There is a God—a personal and eternal God. He created everything outside of Himself. So, the universe comes from a truly personal beginning. Also, Nature was created from a personal, not an impersonal beginning.
8. The Bible says that in the course of a significant story, God created man in a special way, in His Own image and likeness. (Understanding that the main kinship of the human person resides at the top), the Bible says that man is created in the “image” of the divine personality, it's the reference point that appears.
9. Without having (or believing in) this God, a person would be a product of the impersonal + time + chance. No one has yet managed to show how time + chance can transform the impersonal into the personal.
10. Arguing here that people can start with themselves and come to comprehend the meaning of life: According to the Christian approach, a man created in the image of God can begin with himself, but not as a mortal, but as a divine person; and one more important circumstance — God gives fallen man the essential knowledge that he so desperately lacks. (It is all written in the Bible and easily accessible).
11. The Bible does not expound incoherent thoughts. The system that the Bible represents has a beginning, and from this beginning biblical thought develops consistently. The beginning is the idea that, "God is "personal-infinite", and the Creator of Everything that exists".
12. Christianity’s first proposition is that there are established, unchangeable facts, or TRUTHS. “Everything flows, and everything changes” — but that is NOT said about these TRUTHS. These truths are the backbone of the Christian system, remove them, and the Christian creed will be reborn as a mutation, or be stillborn.
13. We must understand that we exist in a constantly changing historical situation, and when going to proclaim the Good News to people, (missionaries), it is important to have an idea of the ups and downs of the modern way of thinking. Without having a clear idea of this, the unchangeable-truths of the Christian creed will enter into one ear and go out of the other ear of the listener.
14. The bible is not a game of the mind and it is not a subject for discussion. Its content should interest not only scientists. In truth, it is crucial for everyone who thinks about the Christian gospel.
I could say a lot about each one of these premises, but much is dependent on continuous paradox, self-created by words used at cross purposes. How to maul a language. The other part of Religion that I will not consider here, is that this befuddlement makes you feel good.
Since this is a complex post, I would like to talk about Girard. But I do not want to overstay my welcome.
thanks
.