I think I got the original post slightly off.
I was critiquing Sam Kriss’ claim that the best traditions come from “just doing stuff”, without trying to tie things back to anything in the past.
The counterexample I was thinking of was all the 2010s New Atheist attempts to reinvent “church, but secular”. These were well-intentioned. Christians get lots of benefits from going to church, like a good community. These benefits don’t seem obviously dependent on the religious nature. So instead of tying your weekly meeting back to what Jesus and St. Peter and so on said two thousand years ago, why not “just do stuff” and have a secular weekly meeting?
Most of these attempts fell apart. One of them, the Sunday Assembly, clings to existence but doesn’t seem too successful. People with ancient traditions 1, people who just do stuff 0.
But after thinking about it more, maybe this isn’t what Sam means. Arches and columns are iconic architectural features. But they were originally invented by people just trying to figure out how to efficiently support buildings (columns might have started as tree trunks, and only later been translated into stone). Likewise, gargoyles are whimsical and exciting, but they started life as utilitarian rainspouts that gradually became more ornamented and fanciful.
Moving from objects to observances - Jews break a glass at weddings because some ancient rabbi broke a glass at a wedding to get people’s attention and tell them to stop being so loud and rowdy. Even very weird supernatural traditions are in some sense “utilitarian” - some theories trace Halloween costumes back to people who genuinely believed vengeful ghosts might be out for revenge that night, and very practically disguised themselves from potential unfriendly spirits.
So instead of the original post’s two opposed things, it might make more sense to think of three things:
Doing something for completely practical reasons, without intending for it to form an aesthetic/ritual/community.
Doing something for aesthetic/ritual/community-building reasons, with no reference to sacredness or tradition.
Doing something for aesthetic/ritual/community-building reasons, with a story of how it relates to sacredness and tradition.
My claim is that both (1) and (3) work well and can potentially be the origin of valuable aesthetics/rituals/communities, but (2) works less well.
But if you need an aesthetic/ritual/community in a hurry, you can’t just do random utilitarian things that make sense for your practical problems and expect them to turn into beloved traditions in a reasonable amount of time - the whole point of the utilitarian route is that you’re not thinking about aesthetic/ritual/community while you do it. At that point, (3) is your best bet.
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P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B), all the rest is commentary.
It's worth looking at non-religious social bonding traditions that have succeeded.
Saying the Pledge of Allegiance at the beginning of meetings is a left-nationalist tradition a little over a century old. Singing the National Anthem before baseball games can be traced back to the late 19th Century, but first became common during World War I and then became universal during World War II, so it seems like another left-nationalist secular tradition from the "Casablanca" era. FDR approved.
My impression is that beginning meetings with an Amerindian land acknowledgment is a leftist quasi-religious tradition that began in Canada around the turn of the century and has spread south into America. It has the problem that it would be extremely rightist in Europe, of course, where it would seem pretty Nazi to acknowledge the rightful claim to this land of Teutonic ancestors rather than the rights to Europe of immigrants just arriving.
The recently ubiquitous "In this house we believe" signs would appear to be a statement of faith by people of basically Protestant disposition who no longer believe in all that God stuff but desperately want to believe in something.
All that stuff goes hard on sacredness though, which seems to be the key point. Sacredness is how human societies designate stuff that is actually important, so thinking that you're enlightened enough to discard it is probably ill-advised.
Both of your examples if the first paragraph fall under the weird quasi-religion that the US developed out of nationalism under the pretense of the US not having an official religion - a concept so prevalent that it has a name, the "American civil religion" [1]
(I want to nitpick your use of "left-nationalist" here, since most on the modern left would be mortified at the suggestion of starting meetings with the PoA - it's very much an American Conservative thing. However, given who you are, I imagine your reference class for "left" here encompasses "median establishment liberals", so I won't push the issue)
As far as your second paragraph... in this context, this might be the most convincing evidence I've seen so far that American Social Justice(/Wokeness) is actually a religion - but it is specifically a protestant sect of American Civil Religion.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_civil_religion
The left-nationalist thing is presumably in reference to who originally created the pledge of allegiance, not who uses it currently. It was a nationalistic socialist (not to be confused with National Socialist) who came up with it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Bellamy
Huh. That did not come up when I initially googled it to see if I was wildly off base. Fair enough, conceded in that sense
Interesting. The Wikipedia entry for Bellamy doesn't mention the earlier version of the Pledge written by Captain George Thatcher Balch in 1885, and popularized by him in a book on how to teach patriotism in schools. This article says Bellamy used Balch's original version as a model. I would be interesting to see how they differ.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pledge_of_Allegiance
Right, the Pledge of Allegiance was written by "Francis Julius Bellamy (May 18, 1855 – August 28, 1931) was an American Christian socialist Baptist minister and author. He is best known for writing the original version of the Pledge of Allegiance in 1892." -- Wikipedia
His cousin Edward Bellamy wrote the massive utopian bestseller "Looking Backward" and founded "Nationalist Clubs."
>it's very much an American Conservative thing
It's very much an American nationalist thing, but hardly "conservative" in the modern political sense of the word. American liberals are by and large happy to say it, and the ritual is very often observed before meetings of American labor unions, including left-leaning (but not the point of anti-Americanism, obviously) ones.
Naturally, leftist groups that are revolutionary in nature wouldn't ritualistically pledge allegiance to the USA, but that should go without saying. And obviously, many liberals who are loyal to the United States and don't mind saying so are nevertheless uncomfortable with the "under God" bit, which was crammed in there in the 1950s as a sort of juvenile nanny-nanny-boo-boo to the godless Communists (and conversely, many right-leaning Americans in the 21st century get a special own-the-libs frisson from shouting "UNDER GOD!"). But none of that makes the PoA intrinsically an American Conservative thing, much less "very much" one.
Nationalism was typically pretty left of center in the 1789 tradition, in part because the ancien regime was based around transnational dynasticism.
No.
Most closely associated with American public school.
Oh, yes. I agree with everything you say. But I might add America is made up of feuding sects of civil religion. Luckily we're not burning each other at the stake — yet.
A "left-nationalist" tradition? Where do you get the "left" from? It dates back to the 1880s, and it was written by a former Union officer at a time when former Southern traitors were trying to weasel their way back into mainstream US politics. I suppose you could call the Republican Party back then as being vaguely leftist because it had a strong anti-big-business bias. But Marx disliked Lincoln and was disparaging of the Union's cause. I don't know if he actually said this, but I found this quote: "The way in which the North is waging the war is none other than might be expected of a bourgeois republic, where humbug has reigned supreme for so long."
The current incarnation of the Pledge with the "under God" codicil was instituted when rightwing communist witch hunts were just revving up. From my perspective, the Pledge is a nationalist ritual, and since nationalism has become one of the emotional crutches of the Right, it's become another ritual for them to symbolically wrap themselves in the flag.
> "The way in which the North is waging the war is none other than might be expected of a bourgeois republic, where humbug has reigned supreme for so long."
You know, I can kinda see that applying, up until Grant was tapped. Why wasn't the most capable general immediately put in charge? Why didn't they even know who the most capable general was? In practice, they were more concerned with rank and internal squabbles, than winning the damn war.
If you get a chance you should read Bruce Catton's _Grant Moves South_ and _Grant Takes Command_. I wouldn't say there are any simple answers to your question, though. Things to remember, though. Grant had left the Army under a cloud with the rank of Captain. After the start of hostilities, he used his political connections to wrangle a Colonel's commission in the Illinois State Militia. No one expected much of him, because his previous military career didn't indicate that he was a military genius. Even after he began to win battles, he didn't toot his own horn, and people tended to underestimate him. And Grant didn't have the tactical flair that Lee had. But Grant's talent was that when he went after an objective, he didn't give up. If it didn't work the first time, he didn't retreat to lick his wounds, rather he'd try another approach. He was stalled around Vicksburg for months and months, and everyone, including Lincoln, thought Grant was flailing and that Vicksburg was well fortified to take. But by sheer numbers, Grant was able to lay siege to it, cut off its supplies, and force its unconditional surrender. Lee was the artist. Grant was the dogged craftsman.
> Where do you get the "left" from?
I think one could make an argument that "nationalism" was something favored by Progressives as the wave of the future, roughly up until the interwar period when it became obvious that a) nationalism made large-scale industrial war easier, and b) there was a compelling alternative in "international socialism", aka communism.
I'd agree that it hasn't been a defining feature of the "left" since around the 1930s or so. Although for a while centrist liberals were making an effort to create a sort of holistic ideological version that eschewed "blood and soil", where nationality could be a matter of choice and conviction and shining ideals and all that good stuff.
More charitably, nationalism appealed to the 19th-century left as a superior-seeming alternative to multi-ethnic empires with conservative monarchical governments, especially Tsarist Russia and Austria-Hungary. Most of the latter didn't survive WW1, so the environment in which nationalism appealed to leftists no longer really applied.
In the 19th century it seemed obvious here in Italy, and in general on the continent as far as I can tell, that if you want to replace the monarchic order with a republican one you must redraw all borders to match ethnicities (or "nations" as they used to be called), which is in fact what happened over the course of a century; just compare the two maps of Europe drawn by the Congress of Vienna and the Treaty of Versailles.
I think the logic was that, on one hand, if the people is where the power lies instead of a powerful king, then you cannot expect separate ethnicities to work together, on the other hand, if you want a republic to be as powerful as possible, then ethnically compatible states that can merge, should.
That would have been the logical reasoning, I think, but it's hard to find a 19th century writer who states it clearly, so obscured it was by the irrational romanticism of that era. They'd rather wax poetic about the destiny of oppressed "peoples" to rise up against their oppressors.
Still, everyone back then gave it for granted that nationalism = liberalism = progress, freedom, democracy, political equality.
I've always wondered when exactly nationalism became right-wing.
I suspect — and this is me talking off the top of my head — that once you've carved an independent nation-state that's ethnically homogenous out of an empire, and you've got everyone speaking the same language, and instilled the same romantic national identity in the populace — then the natural tendency is to worry about maintaining that identity against outside forces and/or elements within your nation-state that don't fit in with your national identity. Whereas creating that nation-state may have been a liberal impulse, preserving the identity of nation-state is a conservative impulse.
The traditional ancien regime was based around dynasticism, which naturally tended toward the creation of a trans-national royal ethnicity. Hence a lot of famous revolutions revolved around nationalist opposition toward the foreign queen, such as Henry VIII embracing Protestantism to divorce his Spanish queen, Marie Antoinette in 1789, and Czarina Alexandra in 1917.
Over time, this became no longer relevant and thus forgotten, but it has a whole lot to do with what was considered Left and Right when the terms were invented during the French Revolution.
With Hitler?
>But Marx disliked Lincoln and was disparaging of the Union's cause. I don't know if he actually said this, but I found this quote: "The way in which the North is waging the war is none other than might be expected of a bourgeois republic, where humbug has reigned supreme for so long."
Is that a direct phrasing from here? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_of_the_International_Working_Men%27s_Association_to_Abraham_Lincoln
I don't think it's a completely fair characterization of Marx's views, he did criticize Lincoln for dithering on the emancipation front but also praised him when he e.g. fired McClellan. He doesn't seem to have expected the Union to conduct a Communist revolution, simply saw the Union's cause as a generally important and progressive movement in the world's history being hindered by the slave state remnant within the Union.
I had that in my list of Marx quotations, but I didn't have a definite attribution for it. My note also says "Intro to Capital (?)". I never tracked it down. Marx is one of those people who's frequently misquoted.
In this context I don't think left-nationalist refers to socialism but what evolved into civic nationalism in the US. Ie non romantic nationalism, intuitively the everyone is welcome but they have to integrate nationalism my grandma was espousing yesterday.
Steve Sailer is a "human biodiversity" crank, by which I mean, he is a person who thinks racial categories are extremely important and meaningful.
And also that black people are worse on average than others.
So I don't know what he means by "leftist", but I'm also not terribly concerned about his opinions.
Nice little ad hominem. I'm sure you support not oppressing black people by testing them for sickle cell because race is a social construct.
I made no ad hominem. I didn't say that Steve Sailer was wrong about the definition of "left" because he's racist. There is no Definition God. It's impossible to be objectively wrong about the definition of "left".
I just noted that Sailer is a a "human biodiversity" crank. Usually, these people have definitions of "left" and "right" that are far outside normal usage. For instance, Curtis Yarvin considers everything since 1688 to be left-wing. So this doesn't surprise me, given his other views.
I do not think that black people are worse, on average, than the other four races, no. I think that's what you meant to ask, but you were trying to be cute and coy instead. I have little patience for this sort of thing.
An ad hominem is when you say negative things about a person making an argument instead of saying their argument is wrong. For example, saying something like, "Steve isn't wrong but he's a racist", would be an ad hominem.
Well, it was a mild ad hominem to call him a crank. But if the shoe fits...
But I agree with you that racial determinists (which I think is roughly what you mean by the human biodiversity moniker) and neo-reactionaries in general tend to distort left-right definitions for their own purposes.
If human biodiversity thinking has much to do with what was considered left or right during the French Revolution (the prime origin point of contemporary ideological terminology), it's mainly that international dynastic marriages (e.g., Louis XVI of France and Marie Antionette of Austria) tended to create a transnational extended family of royalty that were widely viewed as having more familial loyalty to their relatives in other country than to their subjects in the nation they ruled.
I notice that all of those rituals started out as ways to pwn any outgroup members who might be present.
That's certainly true of the PoA, and more so of the "under God" part that was added later. But surely you're not suggesting that it's true of land acknowledgements in North America? Who would the outgroup even be? Some people find land acknowledgements annoying/pointless, and people doubtless exist who actually think it's fine and dandy that indigenous people had their land taken from them, but it's difficult to imagine the people who came up with the idea of LAs thinking to themselves "What can we do to cheese off people who, in the future, will be averse to whatever ritual we're about to invent?" or "Hey, you know what would really rile people who don't care about the plight of the indigenous people of this area? Solemnly acknowledging that this used to be their land and stating that we feel bad about it!" And anyway, before these rituals made their way into the world of woke capitalism--that is, long before anyone on Twitter or ACX noticed and started grumbling about them--they were chiefly done among small groups of like-minded people, so there would be little need or purpose to "own" or troll outgroup members via ritual.
You may not be saying that, though. If you aren't, then forget I said anything.
Much like the PoA, an empty gesture that signals allegiance to woke values is going to score you social points within the woke ingroup and let the outgroup know their values aren't welcome. The specific content of the pledge/statement doesn't matter much as long as it shows which side you're on. The maximally vague statement, "I pledge allegiance to woke values" would work just as well for "pwning" outgroup members.
I........................guess?
The same could be said about quite literally any expression of any view about anything whatsoever by anyone whomsoever--that is, if we're going to make the maximally uncharitable assumption that no expression of any view X by anyone (or, let's be honest, by anyone in our outgroup) is ever intended to be taken at face value as an expression of X but is instead a signal of aggression against anyone holding any view not-X.
But who would ever make such an assumption, other than someone so entrenched in a culture-war mindset that they simply assume any action from anyone in their outgroup is incoming artillery--that nobody from the outgroup ever just does stuff?
What does the word "pwn" mean?
I believe it's a misspelling of "own" (in the sense of "thoroughly win against") that originated in a video game joke & has become a meme. The connotation is of a somewhat immature person issuing a put-down. If I understand correctly.
Thank you
Land acknowledgements are a big deal in Australia right now, and have become a requirement at the beginning of any public event or work meeting.
They absolutely have a religious flavour to them. For me it feels similar to saying the morning Our Father in Catholic school, or saying grace before a meal. I get the same feeling of being engaged in a ritual, and it now feels wrong to speak or doing anything else while the person leading the 'prayer' is talking. And it seems to serve the same purpose - to bind everyone in a communal commitment to a particular religious (political) position.
It's kind of weird how there's so much effort to build a secular countertradition to Christianity when there already exists an ornate ritualistic structure that is, at least in many countries, only barely adjacent to religion if that and has served as a home for secularists for decades. You have to accept a "Supreme Being" but, again, at least in many countries, my understanding is that this is mostly a mere formality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemasonry
A mere formality... which goes against the core tenets of secularism, rationality, etc.
You can easily be a secularist, at least, and acknowledge a Supreme Being.
Sure, but that wasn't my objection. The problem is the attitude that words don't matter, it's fine to say nonsense as long as it fulfills some social purpose.
Yeah, phatic communication is a long-standing phenomenon. And language more generally is kind of primarily a social tool - if I'm the only person around language becomes much less useful (although not to zero, there's still some use for markers of ideas and suchforth)
I share your gut feeling, but I also think setting it aside in some contexts makes for a happier life.
There is nothing anti-rational about belief in a supreme being. Rationality is a process of making sure that your conclusions follow validly from your premises. Beginning from a spiritual axiom rather than a materialist one is just a different premise.
Correct. I've already addressed this in a sibling comment.
Choice of premises isn't arbitrary, and some choices can be irrational. A premise of "there is a spiritual world" does not have the same logical basis as the conclusion that there's a material world (given the fact that we exist - I think therefore I am)
On the contrary, given the fact that materialist attempts to figure out just what it is that's doing the thinking always tend to produce more questions than answers, there's plenty of room indeed for a logical basis for the premise that there is a spiritual world.
"A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion." — Francis Bacon
Well what's your definitions of the "material world" vs the "spiritual world"? My definition is that the material world does not leave room for some additional spiritual world. My definition is that the material world is everything, that everything that is real is material. There can be an imaginary world, where the only aspect of materialism it has is in the form of brain structure and activity. So my definition of "spiritual world" would be an imaginary world that involves the belief in spirits and magic. But if any aspect of that imaginary world were to actually exist, it would exist as part of the material world, not a separate "spiritual world".
So you must have different definitions for these things that make a separate make more sense. So how do you define them?
> My definition is that the material world is everything, that everything that is real is material
Isn't this explicitly circular logic/argument by definition? You're assuming what you want to prove, that there isn't a (real) spiritual world by defining that any spiritual world would have to be imaginary (and thus not real). That's not rational, that's...fallacy.
Personally, I firmly believe that the material and spiritual aren't truly separate worlds, but both facets of a larger system. Effectively, everything we see and experience and can conceptualize is but shadows on the wall, a projection of higher-order truths down onto lower-order (metaphysical) surfaces.
Its not a fallacy, its definintional. You are misunderstanding me if you think I claimed to have "proven" that the spiritual world doesn't exist. I merely stated my definitions for these words and showed you that a "spiritual world" doesn't make sense as part of my definitions.
But you didn't answer my question about what your definitions are. I can only guess as to what they might be based on your statement about the material and spiritual being not truly separate. Well, whatever that "larger system" you speak of is, that to me is the material world. So how do you distinguish the spiritual from the material in that case?
Your definition of the "material world" as everything makes the phrase empty of any meaning except the tautological one that everything is everything. The spiritual world includes such things as intentions, desires and beliefs. These may boil down to arrangements of matter, but no one yet knows how.
Intentions, desires, and beliefs all come from the brain. We've known that since the 1800s at least, and there was already great evidence for this nearly 2000 years ago. I can't imagine what you mean by "no one yet knows how". Of course there are more specifics to discover and understand, but a lot is known as to how these things happen physically as part of the physical world.
You described the spiritual world, but you still didn't describe the material world. I very much suspect that any definition you come up for the material world will inevitably include the causes of what you call spirital.
What I mean by "no one yet knows how" is that intentions, desires and beliefs are the very things that are occasionally derided as "folk psychology" with the implication that they can't possibly be real because we not only can't give a good account of them, we have no idea where to start. But in practice we find them indispensable and not reducible to anything else.
I tend not to use "material world", because I find the concept vague. I think the closest idea I have is of "the universe of physics" - that part of the universe which can be modelled by physical theory. I recognise that this is subject to change as science advances, but at least it is a clear and distinct idea.
Argument by definition (in this case, you define "the material world" as including everything real, and thus excluding any possibility of a real spiritual world *no matter how defined*) is a fallacy. It's a sub-case of circular reasoning, a hollow tautology.
I'm not defining anything at this point. Especially because, in my system of beliefs, *human definitions are intrinsically limited and partial*.
And no, I'm not a rationalist. Because, as we see, a person's premises and starting definitions usually dictate the results they reach through reason. Often, the results are exactly the ones they wanted to reach (knowingly or not) in the first place, and the whole exercise was merely (knowingly or not) self-justification, rather than truth-discovery.
You are a coward for refusing to defining anything.
Some more thoughts on this: it seems to me that religious folks have a weird blind spot where they don't buy that atheists for real don't believe in *any* supreme being. It's not just a small quibble over what your preferred supreme being thinks about butt play.
Similar blind spot: just earlier this week, I ran across a thread on DSL where a christian was claiming that since most atheists in the US are "culturally christian atheists", they should be perfectly happy about the 10 commandments being hung up in classrooms. After all, modern secular morality is heavily based on christianity and pretty much everyone agrees with most of the commandments... yeah, except the part where they were handed down from above, and the first third of them is *very* preoccupied with that claim.
Another classic along those lines is when believers can't even conceptualize morality and goodness in the absence of god. Says more about them than the atheists IMO.
Sorry for the rant, I'm just thoroughly fed up with christians having their heads up their asses on these topics.
It is a natural human mistake to believe that other people must be deep inside just like me. (And there is an opposite mistake to believe that if they differ in some detail, they must be completely alien.) It is difficult to model people who are similar to you in some things, and different from you in other things, because then you never know whether some specific trait is one where they agree or one where they disagree.
https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/typical-mind-fallacy
This is off-topic, but recently I realized that perhaps woke people are genuinely distressed about the idea of their friends talking to people with different political opinions, in a way that I probably couldn't imagine. I always assumed that this was just a rational blackmail tactic, to threaten people "if you talk to the heretics, we will declare you a heretic, too". But now I think that maybe there is a genuine emotion behind that, some actual feeling of horror or revolt at the idea of talking to a person who just recently talked to someone who might have said a horrible thing. Like if you saw someone hugging a zombie; even if they still looked like a human, you would want to avoid them, because you would feel that they are already contaminated no matter how much they deny it.
that's a good analogy. I don't have any special insight, but I suspect that there's a certain type of scrupulosity involved as well. If your beliefs say that words can hurt people and society is this huge looming thing that has lots of power over everyone, then it's not such a big leap towards "silence is violence" and similar things, which would amply cover "associating with the other party" as a terrible thing that directly hurts your friends.
It's also a function of general powerlessness. Plenty of progressives perceive, accurately, that they can actually do very little about all the injustices they feel strongly about. (Genuinely strongly, not as a signalling manoeuvre to get sex, or bolster social standing, or other modes of poseurhood they're accused of.)
But hey, if you can play tiny little purity commissar inside your group of friends, or toward people already inclined to your point of view, then maybe, like a butterfly flapping wings, you can generate a small part of a breeze that bolsters a gale that builds up into the storm that sweeps away the old and leaves space for a better tomorrow. It's cope in the face of a fiendish coordination problem – but it's very human and very understandable.
Having discussed this emotion with a person who experiences it, I'll try to remember how they described it.
You know Singer's argument that if you'd go out of your way to save a drowning child right in front of you, you should also go out of your way to save a drowning child on another continent? Basically, the claim that physical distance may have practical but no moral relevance.
The chain-of-heretics phenomenon is the social version of that. If you wouldn't be friends with a racist, why would you be friends with a friend of a racist...? Why would the chain of responsibility stop with the person who did/said the bad thing?
But this is obviously correct? In the West Christianity is the water we are culturally swimming in without noticing how wet we are.
> they should be perfectly happy about the 10 commandments being hung up in classrooms.
Why not hang up Kent M. Keith’s Paradoxical Commandments?: <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kent_M._Keith&diffonly=true#The_Paradoxical_Commandments>. They seem a good basis to build a rationalist community. And, as far as Christians are concerned, Mother Teresa seemed to like them.
> pretty much everyone agrees with most of the commandments...
Do they? Are they against killing, stealing from, lying to, raping or desiring to do such things to anyone besides members of their ingroup, particularly members of their outgroup? (<https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/>). The natural thing to do is to treat those as competitors to be wary of, livestock to farm or game to prey upon.
If you meant to comment specifically from the perspective of atheism, you should have said so in the first place, instead of talking about secularism and rationality.
If one is a committed atheist who doesn't want to make a reference to a Supreme Being they don't believe in in any context, sure, Freemasons won't be a match, but there's still going to be a lot of people who are neither committed atheists *or* Christians and want traditions and rituals.
Right. Freemasonry has been around for centuries and even has a great movie in "The Man Who Would Be King." In 19th Century America it gained all sorts of spin-offs like the Shriners and Elks. I used to live a couple of blocks from the national Elks club headquarters on the Chicago lakefront, which looks like a vastly larger version of the Jefferson Memorial.
But nobody much cares anymore.
I can't speak for Europe, but I don't think American Freemasonry has recently functioned as a "home for secularists." it's more of a pan-Mainline-Protestant social club. The guys in the fezzes and little cars were in Methodist and Presbyterian pews on Sundays. It is declining largely for standard "Bowling Alone" reasons, but also because it needs Protestantism as a substrate.
On the Continent, Free Mason lodges tended to serve as refuges from the secret police of the Emperor, King, or Sultan. Learning all those secret handshakes made it time-consuming for undercover agents to infiltrate the lodges. For example, the New York Times reported in 1908 that the Young Turks revolution had been hatched in the Masonic lodges of Salonika.
In the United States, however, where Ben Franklin and George Washington had been Masons, the Masons were the big winners, so Masonry wasn't very radical or subversive. Similarly, the great romance of British Masonry, the 20 page short story "The Man Who Would Be King," was written by Rudyard Kipling, who was the epitome of pragmatic conservatism.
In small towns, the Elks (and Moose down south) are still relevant because they are likely the only place in town with a bar that isn’t frequented by criminals and people who start fights. If you’re an elected official or school teacher or someone of that stature in rural America, the only place you can safely go out drinking and be socially accepted is the Elks, unless you have a country club nearby.
After strong-arming some Girl Scouts selling cookies, killing a woman delivering a free meal, robbing Little Leagues' and Habitat For Humanity's equipment, and carjacking the mayor, Tucson's clever low-lifes stole the go-carts from the Shriners.
No more oversize men in fezes scooting around in parades. Nothing is sacred for some losers.
Freemasonry has kind of a bad reputation, along the lines of being a social club for corrupt police officers to meet the kind of people who are interested in meeting corrupt police officers...
If the Freemasons were just nerds like D&F players, no-one would care.
Well, evidently EA, at least, is developing a bad reputation as well, at least in media circles - it's a match!
Probably better not to say these reputations are “bad” or “good” just that these are reputations. These two reputations are not nicely compatible with each other, and so each is likely to see the other reputation as a “bad” one.
For exaample.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/02/secret-handshake-police-freemasons
In the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office, deputies tend to get leg tattoos in a sort of Fascist-Aztec aesthetic to indicate membership in a surreptitious gang of cops.
I wasn't aware that Scotland Yard bobbies tend to join the Free Masons, but, offhand, that sounds highly respectable by Southern California law enforcement standards.
I have a specific story about my Entered Apprentice rite (1st degree Masonry) which for obvious reasons I cannot share, but suffice to say that you can respond as an 18th century deist would have and they will roll with it. The question is even kind of phrased that way in the ritual.
The Unitarians, at least to my Catholic sensibilities, seem to do a decent job of filling the „it‘s Church but secular“ niche, and have been hanging on for over two centuries. Maybe it’s a New England thing, not sure how big Unitarians are elsewhere.
I'm not intimately familiar with the group - I'm working off half-remembered third-hand gossip - but haven't the Unitarians basically adopted progressivism as their dominant ideology to a basically religious extent?
Basically yes. The modern group, the Unitarian Universalist Association, formed in 1961 by merging the Universalist Church of America and the American Unitarian Association, which were liberal Congregationalists groups that can trace their origins back to the Puritans. Obviously they changed a lot in the intervening three centuries, both in terms of theology (dropping Calvinism/original sin doctrines) and general temperament/politics (becoming standard New England liberals). Universalists are pretty much definitionally fluffy big-hearted liberals, but historically Unitarians came in all stripes.
Modern Unitarian Universalism is a non-creedal religion, so you can be hold be a practicing UU and also a Christian, Jew, Atheist, Agnostic, Buddhist, Sikh, Odinist, or whatever. But the UUs did evolve out of Christian churches, which is definitely a big reason they're more successful than the New Atheist groups that tried to start secular churches from scratch.
FWIW, some groups of "Friends Meeting" are also non-creedal in that sense. (Though I expect an Odinist would have severe doctrinal clashes...but they wouldn't be based on which god it was, but rather on the properties of the god. And I expect a traditional worshiper of Kali would have trouble with the Unitarian beliefs.)
<i>Universalists are pretty much definitionally fluffy big-hearted liberals, but historically Unitarians came in all stripes.</i>
You say that, but in Catholic or Eastern Orthodox circles some of the most belligerent members are universalists, at least in my experience.
They didn't so much drop Original Sin as replaced it with various forms of "Privilege," chief among them "Whiteness."
You forgot Pagans and Wiccans in the list of practices, otherwise a great summary. Come be who you are. Very accepting of LGBT+..
Yes, so if you're secular and not leftist, it might be pretty obnoxious, but it's also worth noting that unitarians are very much love-thy-neighbor leftists, not you're-banned-for-not-agreeing-with-us leftists, so it's still a welcoming place.
Oh good, I wanted to mention UU's for anyone looking for a more left leaning* religion. I grew up UU and loved it. (Suburban WNY mostly, small membership ~100, but I lived in Nashville for several years and the UU church there was awesome! Great people and music.) Traditions and the sacred are important in that they are what bind us together.
*as with many things in the US the UU church (at least in WNY) has fallen to the political divide, last I looked they were still flying the BLM flag in front. Too much for me.
A possible counterexample is Raise Candy - but this (1) is more personal than interpersonal, and (2) was not deliberately invented but came to someone in a dream.
What is "Raise Candy"?
I think it depends on what you are doing for reasons of community building and friendly association. For instance, a great many gaming groups for boardgames, community golf, beer league hockey games, etc meet regularly and are completely aware that they are doing this for the social aspect of the activity, and not because they expect to excel to any large extent. Maybe the Sunday Assembly people found out there was nothing much they liked doing with each other, and 'not being religious together' isn't particularly fun? The atheists I knew who ditched atheism for Effective Altrusim suddenly had more things to talk about and make spreadsheets for and try to measure, which is a nerdy sort of fun for people of a certain mindset. If your religion says that G-d will send you to hell if you aren't in Church on Sunday, then you have a compelling reason to be in Church even if it is not much fun at all. Otherwise, your community building is limited by the fact that there are so many interesting things to do on Sundays, and so very little time.
This makes more sense, thanks for the clarification.
A point where I found myself agreeing with the prior post but wasn't sure where it fit in with your overall thesis: even when (3) is a competitive strategy, the surprisingly short history of so many "traditional" practices supports that the secret sauce lies in the *aesthetics* of a connection to the past rather than the historical reality. Pointedly, "actual" tradition can't get much mileage out of (3) being useful as an argument for its own usefulness. And going a step further and pulling out my own axe to grind, this argues against an over-reliance on Chesterson's Fence and undercuts most attempts to cobble together a theory of cultural evolution.
It could be that rationalists don't do aesthetics all that well anymore. Rationalists used to have the Greek/Roman tradition of aesthetics to draw upon (e.g., Brunelleschi and Palladio). But now that seems pretty racist, so what are you going to do instead? Steel and glass modernism?
There's four or five implicit assumptions there that I strongly disagree with but that aside: you still need a viable aesthetic, and you have to commit to the bit. Buying an abbey for two years ain't going to cut it - give it a full generation, minimum.
Le Corbusier definitely committed to the bit. But that was a full century ago. What's new?
Art Deco is having a bit of a comeback, for one. Steel and glass modernism indeed.
But more broadly if you're asking for something that simultaneously codes as new and as traditional to your own satisfaction I'm not sure you haven't over-constrained the problem. The point is getting it to code as traditional, actual age be damned.
Did you ever see the 'Art Church' on Geary at Fillmore (I think) in San Francisco before it burnt down? I forget what it's real name was, and this was 25 years ago or more, I think. I think it nailed 'new and traditional at the same time' with extra helpings of 'awe'.
If somebody can remember the real name of the place, maybe we can still find pictures on the internet somewhere. But you really had to stand in the place to get the complete effect.
Maybe it's on this list? https://www.opensfhistory.org/osfhcrucible/2021/06/27/streetwise-lost-houses-of-worship/
What a useful website! Thank you. But no, the building isn't there. I suppose it is because it wasn't the place of worship for any congregation -- it was a pure art installation.
Aside from Brunelleschi being racist (huh?) what are the implicit assumptions?
The racism angle is just Sailer being Sailer. I disagree ofc, but better to ignore the bait and move on.
"The rationalists" is as poorly-defined as ever, but for just about any casual use I disagree with the notion that it's meaningfully Greek/Roman. Maybe a solstice celebration here or there, but that's really thin.
But there's a richer critique to be made regarding the very notion of "Greek/Roman" in use here: the American tradition of Neoclassicism - which probably *is* old enough to be a tradition in its own right! - is distinct from the Greco-Roman aesthetic it draws upon. And going even further, "Greco-Roman" as a category is the result of explicit attempts by Roman artists to draw upon those Greek predecessors. It'd be a bit harsh to call it "fake tradition all the way down", but it's definitely a case of flattening a whole chain of cultural inheritance!
> But now that seems pretty racist
why is that?
My best guess: There's occasional hand-wringing about whether official pushes for more neoclassical architecture will have the effect of coding European traditions as normative, to the implicit exclusion of non-Euro traditions. (Source: some half-remembered thinkpieces about Trump's executive order (1) on federal architecture.) This is kinda sorta maybe associated with "trad" aesthetic appreciation for classic (or specifically European classical) architectural modes, and the attendant accusations that trad types lionize atavistic or chauvinistic European values.
The term "problematic" is probably more appropriate than "racist", though Sailer may be obliquely commenting on the perceived tendency of certain social justice types to fling poorly qualified accusations of racism at things they don't like.
(1) https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-promoting-beautiful-federal-civic-architecture/
The vast majority of American state capitol buildings have Greek temple facades and/or Roman domes. This is a reflection of Renaissance, Baroque, and/or Enlightenment ideals of rationality. There is a sizable literature condemning the Western architectural tradition as racist for emphasizing styles that are A) superb and B) indigenous.
Doesn't (3) also sometimes fail because it's "too utilitarian" in the relevant sense? For example, meetings of the Sunday Assembly involve singing and dancing (https://www.sundayassembly.org/about), which seems like it's imitating singing hymns or worship songs in church. More generally, to regard something as sacred is explicitly to not regard it as fungible *or* merely instrumentally useful, so there's an inherent tension in adopting sacred traditions for the sake of utility, since whatever is adopted for the sake of utility is both fungible (other routes to getting the same utility can replace it without regret) and instrumentally valued (obviously). The philosopher Paul Katsafanas has had some interesting things to say about this (https://www.paulkatsafanas.com/papers.html): see his papers "Fugitive Pleasure and the Meaningful Life" as well as "Fanaticism and Sacred Values".
Btw the Atlantic article is paywalled (well, free-trial-walled)
stick the link into https://archive.is
Would the invention of new sports fall into #2? Alfterall, at least some modern sports started as doing something fun. Basketball, hobbyhorse, ...
Or maybe sports is off topic and does not count as tradition.
If the new sport is actually fun I think it falls into #1, for a reasonably broad definition of "practical." And if the new sport isn't fun I'd expect it to fail for the same reasons most #2 things fail.
Fair, but if #2 only covers things that are not practical AND not fun AND not by habit, little is left: mischief, propaganda, publicity stunts... ...and virtue signalling
I think #2 mostly captures attempts to build a community without a very clear active purpose to focus it on, which I agree is tricky to manage.
With the exception of Roman chariot-racing and the Greek Olympics, sport as a thing to watch rather than to participate in is relatively new - the only team sport in the modern sense (codified rules, teams selected on the basis of ability, and most people watch rather than participate) that dates back much before 1850 is cricket (which goes back to at least the 1690s). Golf and horse-racing are of similar vintage (again, as spectator sports). Running races (as a spectator sport) obviously date back to the Olympics, and "pedestrianism" was an eighteenth century English craze.
There was this huge burst of innovation between the 1850s and 1900 or so that led to the codification and creation of a host of sports - various footballs (association, two rugbys, Gaelic, Australian, American and Canadian), basketball, baseball, hurling, shinty, (lawn) tennis, probably more than I can't think of at the moment. All of these were being played either professionally, or by full-time amateurs (rich people who played and trained full time but were not paid to do so; several sports had rules prohibiting paying players so as to keep out the riffraff) in front of paying spectators by 1900.
And there are plenty of newly-invented sports. Perhaps the most recent to have reached a reasonable level of prominence is quadball (the adaptation of quidditch into a sport that doesn't require magic, doesn't infringe on a trademark, and has the various non-functional rules from the books fixed).
Quidditch has been more recently invented, but Pickleball seems to be the sport that is having a moment right now. (I hadn't heard of it until recently but apparently it was invented in 1965.)
And why not? The problem with the professionalisation of so many sports is that it leaves so few to be played satisfactorily by normal people without athlete-level skill or fitness.
Most contemporary spectator sports originated in the Anglosphere in the second half of the 19th Century, probably because English speaking countries were out front in rail transport. So teams could go on the road, which necessitated national rules, which tended to be hammered out in post-season conventions in hotels next to railway terminals.
That's why most of the big sports not originated in Victorian England, such as baseball, American football, Australian Rules football, and Canadian ice hockey, were also worked out in English-speaking counties.
what about
4. Doing something for aesthetic/ritual/community-building reasons, with a story of how it relates to completely practical reasons.
Example: "giving 10% of income to charity pledge"
Really, the "practical" thing is to "give the most that you can personally afford to give that aligns with the relative value you personally place on charity versus your own needs and wants".
But we say "everyone should give 10%" as that helps create a communal norm around giving. But the story is that it's practical to give that much.
I think this kind of story works because having a story that relates to practicality makes the tradition more self perpetuating (i.e. people are motivated to do the thing more if they can tell themselves a story about how the thing is actually good)
Another example: I'm a practicing Jew and This is also the way all of traditional Judaism works.
For instance, Jews require a prayer quorum of 10 to pray. This is tremendously beneficial for community-building since it forces the community to get to together regularly and engage in a cooperative activity. But the story is not "we will do this to create a community" the story is "God is more likely to grant our prayers if we do it this way" i.e. a practical reason.
Now, I guess it can seem hard to operationalize this since people might not believe the "practical story" if it seems far fetched and is obviously just a justification of the fun tradition we want for community reasons.
But I think it can be done. Especially since stories about how strange looking traditions are actually utilitarian are more interesting and thus stick out in our mind more than boring old "we do this to make a community" reasons. So even if we know the stories are on some level not the "real reason" we are doing things, our mind sometimes starts treating them that way and then they become the real reasons, even if they weren't to begin with.
> This is tremendously beneficial for community-building since it forces the community to get to together regularly and engage in a cooperative activity.
Hm. If EAs required an in-person quorum of 10 to engage in consequentialist reasoning, that might have prevented as much association with SBF. /joke
technically you can pray without a quorum but certain ritual parts of the prayer need a quorum. The parallel to EA would be if you needed to read selected passages from The Most Good You Can Do with 10 people
I propose a rule that for group of EAs to be maximally effective, there needs to be at least one person concerned with curing malaria, one person who cares about insects, one person who worries about x-risk, etc. (Cannot be the same person; for each category there needs to be one whose #1 concern is that category.) Only if all these people agree on something, we can assume that it is properly rational.
That seems like a decent, if person-heavy, approach to solving the problem of bias and motivated reasoning by using viewpoint diversity.
I think that Scott and the author of the original article are talking about different parts of the elephant. Scott is saying "It is fine to adopt the aesthetics of a tradition without endorcing the rest, and it will probably work better too, its Lindy". I agree, I'm not a Christian but I very much enjoy the commercialized secularised version of Christmas celebrated in America. However I suspect the original article was objecting to over indexing on chesterton's fense that leaning on tradition can cause. Conservative arguments often take the form of "Doing X has worked for thousands of years, we shouldn't risk changing things now". In that case it is a very reasonable objection to say, "wait a minute, this tradition only goes back to the 70s. Why don't we try and figure out why they started doing this thing in the first place? Does it still make sense?"
"I agree, I'm not a Christian but I very much enjoy the commercialized secularised version of Christmas celebrated in America."
And a lot of those traditions come by way of Queen Victoria's marriage to Prince Albert, who brought with him Christmas traditions from Germany, and these getting adopted by the rich trendsetters and filtering down to the masses. The Queen is having a Christmas tree? We must have one!
Charles Dickens is interesting as well, because he really helped popularise the secular Christmas notion with "A Christmas Carol" and descriptions of English customs of the time, but not anything based on religion. The festive goose and plum pudding for the meal, the Fezziwig's Christmas party - these are secular celebrations of generosity, community and joyfulness.
Catholics argue that the especially-British secular traditions were a way to stamp out the catholic traditions - that is, in 1200 or so there was no people-group more dedicated to the blessed virgin Mary than the English, and at some point this became problematic.
My impression was that a lot of the overt conflict had died down by the 1700s, and by Victoria's time it was largely over?
Yeah exactly. The point is that Dickens wasn't close in time to the origin of the secular English Christmas. It later adopted other elements (for instance from Germany), but it started as a top-down psyop.
Some things were indeed repressed as being too Papist, but a lot of traditions managed to hang on as they could be repurposed to be secular, such as well-dressing and beating the bounds, and May poles.
Hallowe'en was more of an Irish and Scottish tradition, so it didn't get 'big' in England until the influence of American culture; the Brits had bonfire night in early November to be the fun start of winter festival, and that developed with bonfires and fireworks and the like.
Which is not to say that there weren't rural and regional English traditions, but unmoored from the patronage of the Church, they went their own way - like soul cakes and sin eaters:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soul_cake
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin-eater
https://youtu.be/Zk--7dzoRDU
You could argue also that religion is so well established because of all-consuming terror for generations. Fear of hell, fear of the Saxons if you were a Slav in 1100. Atheist church won’t work without that. How to operationalize it tho…
Many religions didn't/don't have a clear heaven and hell, or even a clear conception of the afterlife. Often, the dead are just visualised as wandering around in a shadowy spirit realm, vaguely wishing they were still alive.
Many earlier religions seem to have been based on the fear of bad consequences in this life rather than the next. If you don't do the correct rituals and sacrifices then the gods will be angry and some great disaster will befall you.
Bret Deveraux keeps coming back to the theme that ancient people actually really did believe their religions https://acoup.blog/2019/10/25/collections-practical-polytheism-part-i-knowledge/
...And those religions have failed to spread and survive.
They survived tens of thousands of years into historical times.
...When there was far less competition and opportunity for competition. Any new attempt at tradition/religion/culture will have to compete for influence with highly optimized modern-day religions.
And when even those religions are falling apart, what hope is there that anything can replace it? Society is fracturing, crumbling, its members only united in their estrangement. It needs something more powerful, something even more rooted in fear and hatred.
Which ones? Hindus have hells, many forms of traditional Buddhism have hells, Egyptian paganism had a hell, Roman paganism had a hell, Norse paganism had the original Hel, Chinese folk religion had a hell...seems like hells come pretty standard.
Fear of environmental catastrophe? Fear of the Wrong Person getting elected? Fear of ostracization?
Roko's basilisk? 😆
Maybe that would be better kept as an Inner Mystery, like Lord Xenu.
#1 is similar to my theory of fashion trends.
Someone does something that is different from the norm but fills a practical need for them, if they are "cool" then other people copy them even though the practical need often doesn't apply to them. After a while people revert to practicality and wonder why they ever did it. Repeat.
A successful secular tradition building was done in the Soviet Union, where people had to be offered an alternative to church-based rituals like weddings and funerals. These secular rituals are alive today: at least in the more secular post-Soviet societies* most folks get married and buried in secular settings. Church-marriages are perceived as more romantic though: many new couples claim that they consider marriage in church because it looks pretty, feels sacred, and also that's how they do it in the movies. However, they then learn to their disappointment that to get the church to do it they need to have themselves not only Christened but also attend a series of lectures about God and Jesus to reach Conformation (or what it's called). This is too much for many. The church ritual has good and bad sides and so far the secular one is a winner.
* We should abandon the term Post-Soviet as outdated: in these societies the generation that has no memories of the Soviet time has now reached middle age.
> attempts to reinvent “church, but secular”
As an Italian (former) Catholic, I tend to get baffled by such things -- to most of us, going to church mostly felt like a chore¹, and many a teenager's journey to atheism started largely as a search for a pretext not to.
___
¹There was a church near my grandparents' that people would drive to from other parishes because the priest there would say Mass in only half an hour.
As an Australian Catholic, precisely the same deal.
Maybe some American protestant churches have a "community", but I got dragged to church every week for my entire childhood, and we never talked to anybody apart from the compulsory "peace be with you/and also with you" to the neighbouring pews. Just keep your head down, sit through the service, and go home.
I don't think it is possible to replace church with something secular. The fact is, that there just isn't anything else out there that will hold people together so strongly.
Here is the thing about church (or synagogue or mosque or temple or whatever). It is ALWAYS there for YOU. If you have a problem in your life, you can go there and there is a system setup to help you, and everyone cares. No matter what problem you have, you can go there and you will find people who believe it is their duty to be there for you.
I can't think how you would setup a system where people have that kind of devotion to each other, where you all get together, share stories of how your life is going, help each other and have a good reason to keep it going for decades on end. Oh, and if you leave town or country, you have an equivalent that you can just drop into and people already know what you are about and welcome you. Democrat, Republican, Capitalist, Communist? Doesn't matter, because you are part of our book club and are devoted with all your heart to the same thing we are, welcome!
As much as I wish something like the EA community could do the same, or that my local board-games club would organise for people to bring me food every night if there is a death in the family, it's just not going to happen.
The food thing, at least, you might be able to get by asking.
> Oh, and if you leave town or country, you have an equivalent that you can just drop into and people already know what you are about and welcome you. Democrat, Republican, Capitalist, Communist? Doesn't matter, because you are part of our book club and are devoted with all your heart to the same thing we are, welcome!
I'm not sure to what degree the original line is is supposed to be serious or sarcastic, but yeah, fan conventions are very frequently *exactly* like this, whether they're themed around anime, gaming, horror, superheroes, Star Trek or other sci-fi, My Little Pony, or even BDSM.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/weebs?utm_source=post-banner&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true
Oh yeah, I am not denying that there are loads of wonderful supporting social groups out there. But I guess in my mind your use of the term "fan convention" is kind of my point. Sure, there are times when they are there for you. But is it ALWAYS there for you? Any time of day or night? In your local area, where you can literally go to someone's door and knock and you will be let in? And you actually need to make no effort yourself? Just being you is enough?
Because, for example, I lost my faith during my adolescence many years ago now. But I KNOW that if I ever needed, I could go and knock on my old pastor's door and be invited in. And I could say that I don't believe in God anymore, and nothing he says could make me change my mind, but that I had no where else to turn and I really needed someone, and they would take care of me. And I just don't feel I would get that from anywhere else. But perhaps I am wrong, obviously I have a very specific perspective on this topic based on my upbringing. But I do think that it is not obvious how I could offer my children a similar resource that they could rely on 20, 30 years from now outside of a religious group.
I agree. One of my children had to go through major surgery. I mentioned it to one of our church elders who I don't even know the name of (they had done their usual after service "if you need prayer about something, one of our elders is at the front to talk to") and he asked me if we needy any help with childcare, or meals, or finances, or a place to stay near the hospital. Fortunately I didn't need anything like that because I have a lot of family resources, but if I didn't then the church was eager to help.
The Olympics is another great example of building upon ancient traditions.
There is a lot of value in remembering history and tying our traditions to positive examples from our ancestors. I don't think it's plainly obvious that the best traditions come from "just doing stuff".
I thought breaking the glass symbolized breaking the hymen.
It works pretty well for a male orgasm, too: Seems like a cool idea, right up until you do it, and then there's all this broken glass to clean up. So why don't we wrap it in cloth to start with, even if it means the central act isn't as effective as a symbol?
I was taught it was to represent the destruction of the Temple. Although the actual origins seem lost to time and other cultures have traditions of breaking other objects as part of contracts so it might be from that.
I meant to reply to Sam Kriss's comment on the original post, but I didn't get around to it:
"for someone like jordan peterson, a disney film from 1960 is part of the same deep cultural current as a book of hours from 1060, but a disney film from 2020 is not"
I don't see how this is irrational. There are surely, in a sense, many "cultural currents" that began and ended at different times. Or perhaps we should say, there is *one* western/English cultural current that suffers major "breaks" every time there's a a major social upheaval (2010s, 1960s, 1940s, 1850s-60s, 1830s, etc) but continues in a more tenuous form. It's a matter of degree.
Thus, there is:
A very weak continuous cultural current from 1066 to 2024.
A slightly stronger cultural current from 1066 to 2007.
An even stronger and clearer current from 1066 to 1960.
An even stronger cultural current from 1066 to 1935.
An even stronger one from 1066 to 1850.
An even stronger one from 1066 to 1825.
And so on.
Each time there's a major break with tradition, it's reasonable to point out that everything before that point shares something that has now been lost. Even though there were previous breaks where many things were lost before this point. And even though there are still aspects of tradition we still have that have not been lost yet (though of course it's hard to appreciate or even notice what you have when it's not currently threatened). There's no inconsistency in this.
That whole argument just seems to boil down to the tired "if you approved of *any* social change in the past you have to approve of every proposed change in the future." Or more succinctly "either go back to kings or agree with the left on everything."
Maybe there are other options...
CS Lewis, as I recall, said that there was a cultural current stretching back to ancient Greece and Rome that was broken by WW1.
I can see that, I think. Prussia seems like it would be an earlier deviation? And probably the French Revolution and Napoleon, too.
I think this claim is wrong in that there can be a bigger connection that skips times. E.g. there is more connection now to 1065 than there was in 1100 to 1065 (technically the connection strengthened with the end of the Hundred's year war once the Norman English realized they would never rule France). I'm not sure if it's exactly Sam's point but I would say the idea that there was a monolithic past that had a central message that is different from the present is a lie.
To my knowledge, one secular community-building "tradition" that was invented recently and proved highly successful is the anticafe.
An "anticafe" refers to any establishment in Russia and the ex-USSR that charges customers by the minute, and provides drinks, snacks, events, and entertainment for free. This incentive structure favors creating a space where people want to remain for as long as possible, often evoking a cozy house party vibe (see here: https://imgur.com/a/Ewxn9sL).
The theme of each anticafe can be highly niche: one anticafe might specialize in gaming, anime, and board games; another might have a literary theme with bookshelves and poetry readings; while a third might have musical instruments and jam sessions. Frequent customers typically all know each other and collaborate on hobbies, and first-timers have many opportunities to observe activities and join in.
In Moscow, anticafes exploded from a single location (Ziferblat) in 2011 to over 170 by 2014. Although there are some franchise establishments, the growth was mostly driven by independent entrepreneurs replicating and adapting the concept to their interests. A few anticafes were started in Western Europe, but didn't survive Covid.
Personally, I find it puzzling that the format of anticafe has failed in Western countries: the same people in the West who complain about the lack of "third places" go on to say that they wouldn't go to anticafes because they don't serve alcohol, or that they would stress about paying for time, and so on. Why would a novel secular community-building approach blossom in some cultures and struggle in others? From what I can find, the spark of the original idea didn't have any Soviet roots in it: a group of poetry enthusiasts just needed a bigger gathering place and started charging people by the minute to afford rent (as recounted here: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/archive/russian-ziferblat-anti-cafes-london-space-faces-prospect-of-closure)
Why would they be prohibitive from serving alcohol as a tenant of the concept? Most social gatherings are simply an excuse to get drunk/high not alone kind of like how most food is really just a way get butter or sugar in your mouth while pretending you aren't eating a stick of butter or a cup of sugar.
It would seem anticafes as a concept fail because they miss that basic fact of human existence. And especially doubtful if you want me to actually believe teetotaling is now a thing in Russia lol.
Um, I think the whole point of having a community is that your social gatherings are *not* about getting high/drunk, but rather about enjoying the time you spend with these people.
Also I must push back on the last part. Anti-cafes were totally a thing in big cities at least up until 2017 (which is when I left Russia). And not drinking, or at least not drinking casually, is actually somewhat of a class signal in Russia, at least among the young urban middle-class, perhaps exactly because heavy drinking is more common and strongly associated with the working class. Compare with how being fit is a class signal in the US, despite the overall population being more obese.
I wasn't approaching this as a beatnik bohemian gathering, I was more focused on it as a business model, i.e. I feel, just like with with coffee shops, they would do better if they served alcohol in many cases as part of their offering hence found it odd there was a general prohibition on it as a concept. That isn't a hard concept as well, you see it with restaurants, coffee shops, etc anywhere in the world
The ones that let people get high/drunk stay in business while those that don't, generally don't hence if I was looking to open an anticafe, why would I shoot myself in the foot? To me the novel business concept here was renting by the minute all-inclusive, not "we are trying to recreate failed cafes nobody wants".
Also of course the stated purpose gathering isn't to get drunk or high or you would sit at home, it's stated purpose is to provide a veneer for those things while providing secondary benefits such as being social, getting sex, etc. This is no different than eating mashed potatoes but really it's just so you don't feel guilty eating a stick of butter straight; the same reason we put things on bread rather than eat them with a spoon, you feel less bad eat toast and jam than jam with a spoon. Still if you took away the sugar or butter, nobody would eat them by choice or at a cost premium just like taking away alcohol/drugs from social events.
I find even teetotaling events (mostly where being drunk can kill you like skydiving) still generally result in everyone afterwards, well except the anti-social pretentious prudish members, tends to just then go to after/second venue to accomplish the mission. Granted I lost all ties with Russian in 2015 but I can't even believe with a straight face "young urban middle-class" anyone is teetotaling in practice outside what you seem to be saying "ok look at me, I'll virtue signal at a anticafe and then go drink at the club afterwards where those that care won't know because they don't go" lol.
Regardless was an interesting thing to learn about, never heard of them.
PS: Being fit isn't a class signal in the US, being seen working out is. Get down to the lower working class especially among men and they are about as fit as you can be, ever been to jail? Fit doesn't scream "upper middle class" whereas having expendable income to be seen at the gym, engage in expensive highly visibility sports and physical activities, and wear $1000 shoes and $3000 sport watches does.
Hm, I feel like we may be talking past each other due to very different kinds of "gathering with friends" that we have in mind. Like, I'm genuinely confused, do you really seriously believe that gathering with friends is *always* about getting drunk/high and any other reason is just a pretext/secondary? Sorry I mean no offence, but if so it does sound really sad to me.
Or do you mean something more like - when people get together it's *more often* about drinking/getting high, although of course there are other modes, but since getting shitfaced is the more popular thing, a successful business model should cater to that? In this case, I don't disagree with the premise, but there are already places to do that kind of thing and they are called bars and clubs. There is still a potential niche open for the other kinds of gathering, where people want to talk, play board games, collaborate and do other stuff for which loud drunk crowds are actually not ideal. It may be that this niche not very open in the US because other places fill it, see my top level comment, but the point is, it's not that there is no such niche, it's whether it's already occupied.
Same for your example about food and the passage about people going to anticafe to signal. Like, is this what you really wholeheartedly believe? Or are you just being edgy/describing the more common case/meta-signaling your own social aptitude? Or maybe you've read "Elephant in the Brain" recently and took it too literally? I'm genuinely baffled by your apparent insistence that people never do anything except for status or physical enjoyment.
> Fit doesn't scream "upper middle class"
Yep, but being fat AF sure does scream "prole". There are workarounds like for anything of course, but that's the default interpretation.
When people get together, it is (as you put it) mostly about "enjoying the time you spend with these people" For that large majority of humans who are not nerds, Mormons, or Muslims, being at least mildly buzzed makes that time *even more* enjoyable.
And then there's the minority for whom the rule is "the drunker the better"; those guys ruin it for everybody else. As Richard Gadsen notes, you could try to run an anticafe that offers all-you-can-drink beer for the people who want to get mildly buzzed, but then you'll wind up stuck with all the hardcore alcoholics and binge drinkers.
Or you can go alcohol-free, and everybody but us nerds will say, "OK, wait, social time with my friends, but explicitly limited to the not-quite-as-fun version?" and a lot of them will go somewhere else.
Or you can sell alcohol by the drink to discourage the heavy drinkers, and you've reinvented the better class of bar or pub.
Hmm, maybe the reason this works so well in the fUSSR is that the alcoholism problem is so bad that even the better class of bar or pub gets overrun by the heavy drinkers? There's certainly a constituency for whom the ideal social environment is "slightly buzzed like everyone else", but if the choices are no alcohol at all or lots of loud obnoxious drunk people they'll settle for no alcohol.
I'd like to see some anticafes around here, and if at all appropriately themed I'd at least check them out. But we do have the better sort of bars etc, and they'd be tough competition in that market.
If you offer an unlimited amount of cake or coffee or tea, your customers will self-limit which means that the cost can be relatively easily controlled.
If you offer an unlimited amount of alcohol, some fraction of your customers will drink an enormous quantity, which forces you to charge more per minute.
Indeed. Or maybe you either rate-limit the alcohol or have an extra charge for it, because alcohol is expensive in general.
There was a Bob's Burgers episode in which they try an all-you-can-eat brunch with bottomless mimosas and end up with a restaurant full of "brunch skunks" that get very drunk very quickly, because they didn't know they were supposed to have a mandatory meal minimum and heavily watered-down mimosas in order to keep out the people who were only there for the booze.
Or don't, nothing I find people hate more than open bars that aren't open. You just have to factor in that minority the same as you do with any other event where people can abuse it. Also "alcohol is expensive", not really. A bottle wholesale of good whiskey for example, even enough to get a dedicated alcoholic drunk, is US$40. A keg of beer gets a pint of beer down to under a dollar. Even charging a a paltry US$1 a minute which I assume is the minimum rate, you are going to cash out in the aggregate as most customers aren't alcoholics and if they are, well like you said, raise the price or simply kick them out and don't let them come back under the guise "no shirt/no service", i.e. we don't want you here again, you aren't the cliental we are trying to attract.
$1 a minute is $60 an hour which is an expensive evening out.
If you want people to hang out every week, then you're going to want to charge a lot less than that.
Ok ok, you're rich, we all get it, you don't have to work it into literally every comment lol. Seriously $1/minute would be waaay too expensive for an anticafe in the States. I don't know what you imagine the target audience for these kinds of places is, but it's definitely not the kind of person who can spend $25k/month on dining. It's poor students, young professionals who don't have much in terms of money or family yet, board gamers (who are more social than video game gamers, but not wealthier), and other such.
And you are competing with a regular cafe, where people can just sit and buy a cup of coffee or whatever every hour or two for a few bucks. And at $60/hour, say conservatively you have 4 people hanging out for 2 hours, you can easily rent a large place on Airbnb all for your own for a full day for these money, why tf would you bother going to an anticafe.
Right but that goes with anything from electricity to cake. I'm not saying they don't limit it for that reason, I was just more surprised as it was presented as a general ban on anticafes from including alcohol as a defining feature as opposed to the rent by the minute model. You would think there was be anticafes that served alcohol and ones that didn't and they would compete like everything else (and the non-alcoholic ones lose ofc like with any other social business).
Other things are self-limiting. People only recharge their phone and their laptop once. If they stay three or four hours they don't then use more electricity. People only eat a modest amount of cake before they reach a limit.
But give people an open bar and they'll drink too much and then get aggressive and drive away sober customers.
Not to mention that unlimited alcohol for a fixed price is illegal in many countries. Alcohol licenses are expensive. Anitcafes with alcohol are going to need to charge much more per minute/ hour than ones without, and I expect people who want to drink will just go to a bar and pay per drink.
In an anti-cafe (AFAIR) there's no loud music and it's customary to keep your voice somewhat down so that different group aren't all shouting over each other. This is a non-starter for Americans.
More seriously, there's probably much less demand thanks to other options available. Average size of apartment/house in the US is much bigger than in Russia making it easier to meet at someone's place, many of the better apartment complexes have nice common "club rooms" you can reserve with your group of friends, it's often possible to host a board game session in a library, and so on. There's also regular cafes which function pretty much as anti-cafes in terms of what people do there, but instead of paying for time you're just expected to buy something on an honor system (and also because if you're spending a few hours surrounded by coffee and pastries, of course you will buy some). And in California (which would be a natural place for such things to catch on) you can also just meet in a park or at a beach on all except the rainiest days of the year.
> there's no loud music and it's customary to keep your voice somewhat down so that different group aren't all shouting over each other. This is a non-starter for Americans.
What? No. Have you ever been to America?
I can think of literally a dozen sorts of places where there's no loud music or loud talking in American cities off the top of my head. To avoid boring everyone, libraries, cafes in bookstores, bookstores themselves, and fine dining.
I.e. solo activities, not social ones. Also you get plenty of loud people at fine dining, depends the place and income. In my younger dumb richer years where my friend and I would drop $25K a month each month at a certain fine dining establishment, we got as loud and drunk as we wanted. Money talks.
First of all, this part wasn't 100% serious, as I mentioned. But yes American bars and restaurants are almost always annoyingly loud, at least in the last 7 years that I've been living in this wonderful country of ours. I guess fine dining may be an exception, but I was thinking places where regular people go to hang out with friends. But also, how fine are we talking about, like with the typical check per person of 100-200 dollars, or reaching into 4 digits? If it's the former, I mostly stand by my claim. And of course I'm not saying that in Russia or Europe bars and restaurants are never loud, I'm just saying there it depends on the place, and there are enough of quiet[ish] casual places.
As for the rest, well sure, there are plenty of kinds spaces where there's a cultural norm about keeping the noise down, but in the US restaurants are very much not one of them (unfortunately), and I'm guessing that anticafes would most likely inherit the norms from regular restaurants.
If you can find fine dining for the former, we have different definitions of fine dining lol. At least hereabouts you are usually talking 300 to 400 a person at the low end. TGI Fridays and Red Lobster aren't fine dining though their bills generally run about a $100 a person if doing dinner. Regardless though I agree with the gist of what you said there sans "annoying loud". At least for Americans, that the draw, it's how you find what is popular or entertaining as they have people. The death silence of Japanese bars along with apparent apathetic boredom of most Central and Western European bars makes you want to stay home generally and most people do I find. You want to find a full bar in Germany, listen for the music and roar of the crowd, not the quiet neighborhood bar with two alcoholic truck drivers and a Turkish pimp all engaged in electronic slots.
I've no idea what's the definition of fine dining lol, the point is, it's a different crowd and different kind of entertainment than anticafe. Re noise, it's annoying when it makes it difficult to talk, but that's just a question of taste/what one is looking for I guess.
Counterpoint: Here in the Los Angeles area, I don't think any bar or restaurant I have been to in the past seven years has been annoyingly loud, and my tolerance for that sort of thing is fairly low. Go back more than seven years, and there are a few that stand out, so obviously I don't go to those any more.
And some of these bars are attached to restaurants, yes, but nobody is spending $300-400 a person; you can get a decent meal for a tenth of that.
Not sure if this is a regional thing, a class thing, or what, but it works for me.
As someone who often organizes conferences, some UIS conference hotels have a related idea.... that is, you can pay for the room and get the food for free, or pay for the food and get the room for free ... the hotel does not care which, but has a clear idea of how much total money they want to bring in .. but recognise that the client may have obscure accounting/budgeting.tax reasons for preferring one over the other.
I think you are missing subjective realities?
I'm reminded of an apocryphal story about a famous Rabbi (henceforth FR). One Friday afternoon a family member, after sweeping the back porch for the Sabbath, left the broom on the back porch. "Quick, quick, bring the broom back in," said FR. "Why?" "Otherwise the students will think it's important to leave the broom outside to honor the Sabbath." And that is why, even unto today, the disciples of the disciples of FR leave brooms on their back porches on Friday afternoon and then, quick, quick, bring them back in.
Tradition is always changing. What is traditional now, wasn't traditional as recently as 20 years ago. And in many cases, what people think is traditional, was focused on the same original practice or belief, but what we think is traditional about it keeps changing. If you took, say, cultural leaders from the turn of the 19th to 20th centuries, and introduced them to conservative belief systems today, they would be befuddled. "How did 21st century society get so sexually decadent?" they would wonder. It works the other way around as well, what was once considered progressive would confuse people now, Behaviorism, for example. Probably we can't really preserve the past as it was, because the context is gone. But nothing is more traditional than nostalgia, and there is nothing wrong with that.
You don't want a functional replacement for religion in an era when religion is declining, to society's cost. You want something that builds social trust in the modern era. It isn't clear to me that there is a solution to declining levels of social trust, but if there is, it won't look like any institutional practices of the past, except in a deep way that isn't obvious. People define their in-groups, at least in part, via common belief systems, so I would think that to replace religion and build social trust, you need a new belief system that people could identify with. I don't know of very many contenders.
As for Indian food, I'm going to let the people who actually run the restaurants, who in most cases appear to be immigrants from India, define their own food. If they tell me it's "Indian" in some sense, then for me it is.
>f you took, say, cultural leaders from the turn of the 19th to 20th centuries, and introduced them to conservative belief systems today, they would be befuddled. "How did 21st century society get so sexually decadent?" they would wonder. It works the other way around as well, what was once considered progressive would confuse people now, Behaviorism, for example.
Lewis wrote on this in his essay "On the Reading of Old Books"
"All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united—united with each other and against earlier and later ages—by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?”—lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them."
https://www.eighthdayinstitute.org/on-the-reading-of-old-books
Well said. Ultimately it comes to some kind of trust in the human spirit. What gets lost on one side due to the force of changing circumstances will eventually come back in a different form if it's truly important.
Explain the place of the necktie within this schema
It was originally functional (a piece of cloth worn round the neck to keep the sun off and stop your shirt getting sweaty), and later evolved into a decorative item.
Nice.
If you're bored, how about the cummerbund, tuxedo, and socks?
Socks help keep your feet the right temperature and avoid them getting sweaty.
The tuxedo was just a formal version of the regular jacket.
The cummerbund was a cut-down version of the waistcoat designed for use in tropical climates.
The dinner suit (tuxedo to the Yanks) is a _less_ formal version of the tail coat.
The evolution of the tuxedo from "this is just a practical garment you can throw on for casual dinners when you don't feel like getting dressed up properly" to "this is a piece of clothing so formal that most men under 40 have never even worn one" over the course of just a century is wild.
Creating traditions is hard, you need to have enough people continuing to do the thing long enough that they have kids who grow up doing the thing and it becomes "yes, this is the thing we do".
It also needs mass adoption to get that level of "so many people are doing the thing, we do the thing too and have plenty of company and support as we do it".
Old customs and traditions die out because there aren't enough people left to carry on doing them anymore, or the new generation is more interested in "what are the new fun things that modernity brings to us".
Speaking of Hallowe'en, traditional Hallowe'en is pretty much gone here, and the Americanised imported version has taken over. Now Hallowe'en decorations are a thing you can buy in shops, and people put them up on their houses. Children go 'trick or treating'. The older customs have made way for the new 'tradition'. Part of that is indeed the shift from rural to urban, old communities breaking up and new ones forming that didn't include the customs of the previous generations, and the huge influence of American culture via TV, movies, pop music, and the rest of it.
I can't complain too much because at least it's still Hallowe'en, and there's something left. What is more annoying is the set of revivalists of something they pronounce as "Sam-hane" and promote as going back to pagan roots. *That's* a worse kind of faking up new traditions out of the corpse of the old. (At least over here we avoided the opposite complaints by the hyper-religious about "Hallowe'en is pagan devil worship and not Christian!" because we don't have the same kind of Protestantism as the USA). The turnip (swede/rutabaga) carved-out lanterns became the carved pumpkins in America (much easier to carve than a turnip!) and have now come back home, so that you see pumpkins in shops now for Hallowe'en (and since we don't have the same tradition of cooking with pumpkins, a lot of these just go to waste).
"some theories trace Halloween costumes back to people who genuinely believed vengeful ghosts might be out for revenge that night, and very practically disguised themselves from potential unfriendly spirits"
Going off memories from a rural childhood, yes, more or less. Hallowe'en is the hinge of the year, when the dead and the spirits and the fairies move freely between the Other World and the mortal world. There was a tradition (though gone by my time, my family didn't do it) of preparing the house for the dead souls of the family to come back and visit:
https://www.museum.ie/en-IE/Collections-Research/Folklife-Collections/Folklife-Collections-List-(1)/Religion-and-Calendar-Customs/Hallowe-en-Samhain
"Traditionally a harvest of fruit and nuts was gathered for the festive fare and also featured in children’s games on the night. Marriage divination games were also played. Hallowe'en was also known as ghost night or spirit night and the souls of the dead were expected to return to the family home. Evil spirits were also thought to be active and people avoided travelling alone on this night.
Ghostly masks were made to frighten neighbours on Hallowe’en and bands of men or children liberated by their disguises, often went visiting and entertaining.
Special crosses were made and placed above the door to protect the home from bad luck for the coming year."
There were also Hallowe'en games, you can read up about those as well online. Divination games to foretell who would get married during the year, or die. Barm brack (the fruit cake/bread) with tokens inside - the commercial variety on sale today keeps the ring (whoever finds the ring will marry within a year). So, veering next to magic/invoking the Devil for some things, because you would go out to perform the charms to see who was going to be your husband.
By my time, a lot of this had gone and was historic customs, but some remained.
So it used to be not just children but adults as well who would dress up and go from house to house. You were supposed to do a little performance to get the 'treats', sing songs and dance or something like that, before you got the nuts and apples or maybe some money (chocolate was not a big thing back then).
People would 'guise' (that is, disguise); if you didn't have a mask, you would blacken your face with burnt cork (no, this had nothing to do with blackface). Men would dress as women (this might only be 'wear an apron, shawl, headscarf') and women would dress as men - this was all part of the reversals of the night, and pretending you didn't recognise the disguised neighbours, and of course yes to fool the spirits and ghosts (witches not so much, it was always more the fairies are the danger in Ireland).
Of course you'd gather round and tell ghost stories; the story of Tadhg O'Kane and the Corpse is a folklore story about a man who had no stories to tell when visiting the neighbours, so he ended up getting an experience that would be a great story ever after.
Translation by Douglas Hyde (first president of Ireland) here:
https://sacred-texts.com/neu/yeats/fip/fip08.htm
All this was entangled with the Christian traditions of visiting graves and praying for the souls of the dead, as well. Yes, Hallowe'en was pagan, but it was just as much Christian in its origins.
A poem by Patrick Galvin about the dead coming back for Hallowe'en:
The Aunt
On All Soul's Night
My father said the aunt was due.
We set a table near the fire
A glass of wine, a loaf of bread.
Was that the way to greet the dead?
My father said it was.
At three o'clock the aunt arrived
I heard her knocking at the door
And I went down to let her in.
Her eyes were wide and black as sloes
And she had clay upon her clothes
And she was thin.
Her breath was cold.
And as we sat beside the fire
I asked her if she'd like some wine.
She said she never touched the stuff
And honest bread was quite enough
When you were dead.
I watched her eating for an hour
And saw the grave beneath the skin
The moonlight through the bone.
Now and then she coughed and cried
And said she wished she hadn't died
The nights were chill.
At four o'clock she rose to go
But as she reached the kitchen door
She turned and kissed me on the lips
And then she smiled -
When you are not your father's child
We two shall wed.
I feel stupid, because I've been pronouncing it Sam-hane! How is it pronounced, then?
In Poland, we don't have Halloween, but we have a tradition of divination on St. Andrew's Day, November 30. My son's name is Andrew, so I taught him how to do it. You take a bowl of cold water and melted wax from a candle, pour the wax into the water, let it solidify into shapes, and tell your fortune from the shapes. I've been told it's an old and probably pagan/pre-Christian Slavic tradition. With our son we keep it very light and fun, like, one time he saw an octopus in the wax: "That means Daddy and I will take you to the aquarium," that sort of thing.
I don't mean to be nasty to people making honest mistakes because how are you to know how to pronounce foreign words? It just makes me grit my teeth when I hear people confidently talking all about the traditions of "Sam-hane" when they can't even be bothered to learn how to pronounce it! Years back, I would be hearing people talking about the British horror movie magazine "Sam-hane" and it wasn't till I saw it written down that I went "you mean Samhain????"
In modern Irish, it sounds something like "sow-anne". Oíche Shamhna is Hallowe'en Night, literally "the Night of Samhain" and is "ee-hah how-nah".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dey8kycqiGQ
Ok, thank you!
Interesting, there's a similar divination tradition in Finland on New Year's Day, expect you melt a small horseshoe made out of tin and pour it in water.
In linguistics, "just doing stuff", as opposed to following tradition, might be comparable to inventing a new language. Esperanto was one effort at that a century ago, but one doesn't hear much about it these days. It probably doesn't help that every "female" word in Esperanto is indicated by a suffix of "ino" and, If Italian is anything to go by, that presumably means "little" or "lesser", which these days sounds sexist.
Rows of stone pillars in temples probably originated as trees in sacred forest groves, but doorways in permanent dwellings were probably mostly a pair of upright stones with a stone lintel resting on them. I believe the Etruscan word for doorway was something like "triomph", from where the word "atrium" derives ("entrance hall"), and "triumph" (grand processional entrance, into a city), and the port of Atria (now Adria, on the Adriatic Sea), etc.
One might assume that the Etruscan word was a combination of "Tri" (three) and "omph" (stones), but that is spurious ("spurious" ironically being from another Etruscan word!) because according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etruscan_numerals their word for three was "ki".
Nice comparison, thanks for bringing linguistics in :)
An alternative take could be that the linguistic equivalent of "just doing stuff" would be just speaking your personal dialect, without regard to some authority's idea of how you should be saying things, and as they teach in linguistics 101, that's how languages manage to evolve a shared consensus on both grammar and vocabulary from the bottom up, without anyone to oversee it.
The problem with utilitarian traditions is that they are attended by other utilitarians.
And as such every "meeting" is subject to a cost-benefit-analysis. I can miss this meeting and it should be fine, I get most of the utility even if I don't attend this specific meeting. But once everyone starts thinking like this the traditions quickly wither and die. It's kind of like a prisoners dilema.
Religion solves this issue by making the cost of defecting much much higer than the cost of cooperation (YOUR SOUL WILL BURN IN ETERNAL HELLFIRE!)
For traditions to survive they need to be consistently enjoyable* (poker nights or softball league) or have asymmetric costs for defection.
*Consistently enjoyable relative to the alternatives. But as the number of alternatives expand, traditions based around enjoyment fragment and die (hence the death of bowling leagues)
You have somewhat of a point here, but utilitarians are perfectly capable of meta-gaming, for example by writing blog posts bemoaning the lack of secular traditions.
The type of utilitarian who just executes the greedy algorithm in every situation does exist. So does the type of utilitarian who throws their intuition in the trash and blindly follows "the math". Building secular traditions is about overcoming those things, at least in part.
>utilitarians are perfectly capable of meta-gaming,
You would think so but the dearth of secular traditions despite people trying to create them shows otherwise.
It's easy to imagine being rational, much tougher being rational.
You see the same behaviour with CEO who will all bemoan short termism but then consistently try to manage quarterly results / expectations.
It seems we don't actually disagree on anything here, except possibly on the difficulty of getting a secular tradition going. It's a hard task, failure is to be expected, etc.
I don't think it necessarily needs to be enjoyable, but I suspect the "enjoyment" and "practical benefit" aspects together would need to be greater than 0, even leaving aside the social bonding aspect.
This is why the whole idea of creating rituals for the sake of rituals is wrong-headed. Rituals need to be fun and rewarding in themselves if they're going to take off.
Some rituals that aren't particularly enjoyed by anybody do have some staying power (e.g. church services), but I'm not sure why you'd want to invent new non-fun rituals when you could be inventing fun ones instead.
There's lots of weekly, fortnightly or monthly things you could be going to. There's probably trivia nights. There's probably sports leagues. There's probably meetups based around your favourite hobby. If you're bored and lonely then go do those things instead.
> This is why the whole idea of creating rituals for the sake of rituals is wrong-headed. Rituals need to be fun and rewarding in themselves if they're going to take off.
It depends on the kind of ritual you're talking about.... Dancing is a pretty good ritual, it's been done more or less since the dawn of mankind. Give people a new excuse to dance, and it might catch on.
It's not enough to just create "fun" rituals.
Almost every activity, trivia nights or rec sports leagues or niche internet forum are run be a very small group wildly dedicated people / power hungry (rec league commissioner or forum mod).
For rituals to succeed in the long term you have to continuously attract such kind of people.
I don't know what the solution is to ensure you continuously attract such people but with it "just fun" rituals will eventually die out.
> The counterexample I was thinking of was all the 2010s New Atheist attempts to reinvent “church, but secular”. These were well-intentioned. Christians get lots of benefits from going to church, like a good community. These benefits don’t seem obviously dependent on the religious nature. So instead of tying your weekly meeting back to what Jesus and St. Peter and so on said two thousand years ago, why not “just do stuff” and have a secular weekly meeting?
>
> Most of these attempts fell apart. One of them, the Sunday Assembly, clings to existence but doesn’t seem too successful.
One significant factor seems to be that the believers who get such social benefits from it are explicitly not trying to do so as-such. A bit of Googling turns up plenty of relevant quotes from across Christianity:
- "The church was not founded to be a social club for social gathering, even though we do gather for fellowship. It was first and foremost founded by Jesus Christ to be a spiritual gathering." ( https://rgm.me/the-church-isnt-a-social-club )
- "The answer, to put it simply, is that the church isn’t just an invention of Christians who were trying to fulfill certain needs—fellowship, teaching, and so on. It’s much more than that. In fact, the Bible seems to hold the local church out as a unique organization, one unlike any parachurch organization, any other ministry, or any other institution in the world. It is, by Jesus’s own royal prerogative, the embassy of the kingdom of heaven to this rebellious world." ( https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/the-church-is-an-embassy-not-a-social-club/ )
- "It should be recognized that this church is not a social club. This is the kingdom of God in the earth." ( https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/1990/04/rise-to-a-larger-vision-of-the-work )
- "When the church turns into a club, we start making extra requirements and lose our focus on the people not yet there." ( https://renovationchurch.org/messages/thechurchisnotaclub/ )
Is it possible that a belief in the transcendent is a necessary psychological factor for obtaining these benefits?
Yes, that's quite clear, in the sense that tradition should take you out of your own personal frame of reference and transport you into a communal mindset that provides the feeling of transcending the merely personal boundaries of your own existence/purpose.
TL/DR: Practicing it should make you feel connected to something larger and more important than you are.
IMO - Archetypes/symbolism may the language to capture the truth, love and beauty of the platonic realm. This resonates deeply inside people even if they might not fully "understand" or "believe". https://youtu.be/Qi9ys2j1ncg?si=pAor91tbrto8pyUC&t=5369
One thing that I think these atheistic "religion substitutes" lack which explains their failure as communities is having a grand salvific vision. In most religions, there's a concept that it's literally your soul and the souls of all humanity on the line, which provides a motivation to both maintain and grow your social group. You become passionate about your beliefs and wish to proselytize them because you think that you're spreading the future kingdom of heaven. While they might have some principle of devotion to reason or science that motivates them, it seems that the lack of this sort of truly grand vision is what explains atheistic congregations failing to have the same social cohesion and benefit as the religions they're taking after.
With this in mind, I have an idea for an eschatological concept that could possibly provide the same sort of organizing motivation for atheists. As people on here who recognize me might know, I believe the long term future goal of humanity should be to convert as much of the universe as possible into hedonium. Here, hedonium is defined as a conscious arrangement of matter that experiences the maximum possible amount of pleasure per unit mass. I believe the utilitarian maxim of the greatest good for the greatest number compels us to devote ourselves to bringing about uncountably many minds experiencing unimaginable levels of pleasure in perpetuity. Therefore, I propose this as a motivating, salvific, eschatological principle for atheistic pseudo-religious organization: a "cult of hedonium" devoted to bringing about this "hedonium shockwave" of our forward light cone being filled with hedonium to the maximum possible extent. Just as Christians envision and seek to bring about the kingdom of heaven, this instantiation of a "heaven on earth" would provide a grand vision for an atheistic pseudo-religious community to rally around and seek to enlarge its memetic footprint in the same manner proselytizing religions do. By having an ultimate end goal that is sought to be brought about, a community can have a grand idea that binds it together and provides social benefit in a way that only uniting for the direct sake of that social benefit seems to clearly lack.
So, how about it? Who wants to join the newly created Cult of Hedonium, and bring about a true heaven on earth, while having nice social benefits of cohesion and a sense of belonging along the way?
I'm going to assume that you're making a trollish joke to point out that the idea of artificial customs is fundamentally mistaking a signal for the actual data, similar to mistaking the nervous system's reward signal for the actual thing being rewarded.
Mostly, social customs started as something meaningful, and became a widespread bonding ritual, but the bond works because there was a meaningful thing to connect to in the first place. Noticing a lack of bonding rituals, and trying to create them out of whole cloth, seems doomed if there's nothing meaningful for the bond to hook into.
Maybe if EAs want to create a bonding ritual, they should figure out something that acts as both a symbol and practical demonstration of a core belief, which can be practiced together as a group activity, but also alone in appropriate circumstances.
I'm not making a trollish joke, I genuinely meant to provide a proposal for something grand and eschatological enough to serve as a substitute religious organizing principle.
But pleasure's just a signal! We could hack our brains and directly stimulate it. How would that be different?
Afterwards, we probably wouldn't care about tiling the universe in hedonium, either. Does your current goal hold importance even if your future self would abandon it?
And even if we'd still care, we could just edit our memories to think that we already did, right? So would the actual universe still be important?
Pleasure may have originally evolved as a signal towards an instrumental end of survival, but since we can directly experience it as good in and of itself, it doesn't matter why it came about, only that it is good now that it has come about. So pleasure maximization becomes a goal in its own right beyond the purposes of survival that pleasure might have originally come about because of. And further, since pleasure is directly knowable as holding positive value, I would say that it matters whether pleasure in the universe really has been maximized or not, not whether we merely think it has, so it matters whether we have really unleashed a hedonium shockwave, not just whether we think we have due to delusion.
Sorry but no thanks! My experience so far, is that any group that wants to shape the world in some grand way just wants to turn you into a soldier for their vision. Hard pass.
As for #2, Burning Man and the Rainbow Gatherings come immediately to mind.
I vaguely remember Christopher Lasch writing something about "continuity". IIRC he asserted that during the Wild West, Americans had a psychological sense of continuity with past and future generations. I.e. they felt they'd inherited a debt from their ancestors, and simultaneously felt that all their toils in this life were directed toward the benefit of posterity. But in modernity, Americans are "ahistorical" in the sense that there's a lack of connection with the past and future.
I feel like I haven't grokked this 100% yet, but I imagine it might be an important ingredient of successful traditions. Perhaps moreso than the genuine factuality of a given tradition's historical claims, or the austere pragmatism of a given tradition's immediate usefulness.
A counterexample to the claim that (2) doesn't work is the Church of Interbeing. They replace the sacredness or tradition with essentially psychotherapeutic practices, and those services are heartfelt enough to be kept going.
Okay, maybe something doesn't "really" work until it has been around for several decades. But chaos magic has. They claim to be about if we can see, the experimental rituals trying to trigger paranormal effects, so maybe that's on the practical end, but they're definitely also intending to do ritual because that's just what they do.
Maybe one weird corner case doesn't obviate your three categories. Still, nit got to be picked.
Community is one of those psychological effects (happiness is another) that I suspect you cannot create on purpose. For the sensation to be meaningful, it has to come out as a side-effect of some other activity.
Connect on several levels at once, is what I'm saying.
I have a much simpler theory. Every community-thing started once, and either caught on, or didn't (or barely stayed, like the atheistic pseudo-churches). That's just the marketplace of ideas! Most new companies never get far. Most new philosophies are worthless. Most new blog posts get barely a few reads. Sturgeon's law is never very far, and when you get inspiration (deliberately or implicitly) from the past, you're pattern-matching on things that already managed to get traction earlier. Which doesn't guarantee anything, but at least it tells you they have a shape that meets some human need.
Main point is, it's not about how much you copy the past, it's about how much there is a hole shaped like your new thing in the present. If there is, and the winds of chance help word get around through the right people, there you have it, success!
My go to example here are not "big culture" examples, but random things that caught on pretty well. Just around here I know of several villages that have major medieval-themed festivals once a year, some of them for multiple days, with thousands of people attending. Obviously this is the kind of success that Scott's is talking about, and it's community-based. But it just got started one random year by some random guy, and unlike the contrived pseudo-churches, it caught on because it's a good match for stuff that actually attracts people.
“Jews break a glass at weddings because some ancient rabbi broke a glass at a wedding to get people’s attention and tell them to stop being so loud and rowdy.” Source? Is this meant to be a joke? It’s well-documented that the tradition is a remembrance of the destruction of the Temple, incorporating an element of mourning into the festivities.
I've never really understood Jewish attitudes towards the temple.
"So first we built a temple"
"That's good!"
"But it got destroyed"
"That's bad"
"So we built a second temple"
"That's good!"
"But it got destroyed"
"That's bad"
"Yep"
"So, are you going to build a third temple?"
"What, are you crazy?"
Chesterton talks about this in Heretics, where he says that Comte's good idea was his rituals and ceremony (whereas his English supporters thought that they could be dispensed with, and his actual good idea was his "theology").
I think this scale of first doing things for practical reasons and then gradually doing them for more and more abstract and detached reasons until everyone does it because "it's traditional" is very close to the four-stage process of the sign-order as described by Baudrillard:
"The first stage is a faithful image/copy, where people believe, and may even be correct to believe, that a sign is a "reflection of a profound reality" (pg 6), this is a good appearance, in what Baudrillard called "the sacramental order".
The second stage is perversion of reality, where people come to believe that the sign is an unfaithful copy, which "masks and denatures" reality as an "evil appearance—it is of the order of maleficence". Here, signs and images do not faithfully reveal reality to us, but can hint at the existence of an obscure reality which the sign itself is incapable of encapsulating.
The third stage masks the absence of a profound reality, where the sign pretends to be a faithful copy, but it is a copy with no original. Signs and images claim to represent something real, but no representation is taking place and arbitrary images are merely suggested as things which they have no relationship to. Baudrillard calls this the "order of sorcery", a regime of semantic algebra where all human meaning is conjured artificially to appear as a reference to the (increasingly) hermetic truth.
The fourth stage is pure simulacrum, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. Here, signs merely reflect other signs and any claim to reality on the part of images or signs is only of the order of other such claims. This is a regime of total equivalency, where cultural products need no longer even pretend to be real in a naïve sense, because the experiences of consumers' lives are so predominantly artificial that even claims to reality are expected to be phrased in artificial, "hyperreal" terms. Any naïve pretension to reality as such is perceived as bereft of critical self-awareness, and thus as oversentimental."