2. What is Religion?
WARNING: I’m a seer, not a scientist; I’m an entertainer, not an expert. With a sword.
Abstract
We humans live in groups because groups tend to out-survive lone individuals. And we form bigger and bigger groups because bigger groups tend to out-survive smaller groups.
But humans were originally designed by natural selection to live in groups no larger than 150. We were designed to cooperate only with those humans we recognized, and there was a strict limit on how many we could—and how many we still can—recognize: 150. This is Dunbar’s number. All humans outside our 150 were to be feared as predators, and for the usual reasons: humans are killers—hunters and eaters of meat who prioritize their own survival over ours.
A group of male chimpanzees will typically attack and kill any lone, unrecognized male it comes across. And tellingly, chimps are still limited to that same group size, to the number of chimps they can recognize: 150. So, just to be clear about this, chimpanzees, our closest primate relatives, live in groups of 150 or less and treat all chimps outside the 150 as enemies to be killed.
So, how does a human born with the same deep-seated fear of strangers live among strangers when group size exceeds 150? Religion. Religion is whatever allows groups of 151+ humans to exist. Yes, that’s all religion is. Don’t be distracted by all the trappings. We’ll get to that.
For all of human history up until very recently—just 12,000 years ago—human group size stayed under 150. When groups finally did start hitting the 150 mark, one of two things would happen. If there was adjacent empty land available, the group would split in two with one group moving off into the new territory. Then both groups would grow back to 150, and split again. If there wasn’t any adjacent empty land, the group was trapped, and would have to keep itself at or below 150 any way it could.
Having all groups at 150 is fascinating to contemplate. There could be little to no communication between groups because if anyone started learning the identities of individuals from neighboring groups, they’d forget members of their own group. That caused languages to proliferate as fast as the 150-societies did. Over time, each society’s language would drift so far apart from those of its neighbors that the society lost even the possibility of communicating with those neighbors. And there was no point in conquering one’s neighbors either, for similar reasons.
So there we were, packed like sardines into our little 150-societies for who knows how long. And then—boom!—out of nowhere, morality burst on the scene and human group size became unlimited.
Why Wolves Might Need Religion
The Assumptions
Let’s reason a bit about packs of wolves. The point I’m trying to make about humans is easier to understand when you can see the fangs. And anyway, as will be shown, human society is best described as wolves on tiptoes, each one dolled up in a Little Red Riding Hood outfit.
We’ll start with three assumptions (which are not true in the real world, but aren’t totally made up either):
The maximum size of a wolf pack is 10 members.
A max-sized pack (of 10 wolves) requires exactly 5 square miles of territory to survive.
Wolves maintain a strict dominance hierarchy.
We’re going to further assume that there are simple and specific reasons for the two numeric limits; that is, the 10 members and the 5 square miles. 10 members is the max group size because wolves can’t remember more than 9 other wolves. 5 square miles is the amount of land required because that’s the minimum amount of land required to provide the food for 10 wolves. Any less land and the pack would be starving; any more, and it would be spending too much time defending land it didn’t need. Such precise limits are the kinds of things natural selection carves out very, very slowly, and alters just as slowly. So, in the theorizing below, we’re going to treat 5 and 10 as essentially hard-coded, unchangeable values.
Full Pack Kills Intruders
Now let’s say we put up a 5-square-mile fence and drop a full 10-member pack inside. Then, after the pack has acclimated itself, we drop in one more wolf. Given our assumptions, we know the pack will kill that wolf. The pack will instinctively know that the group is full, and if they let the stranger live—in or outside the pack—the pack will begin to starve. And even if the pack didn’t begin to starve, there would be another, bigger problem.
The dominance hierarchy would break catastrophically. With 11 members, every member in the group would have one other member it didn’t recognize. Should it happen upon that member, the dominance face-off protocol—some sort of a fight—would be triggered. And as soon as that fight was over, and each combatant had added his opponent into his personal copy of the dominance hierarchy, each would have forgotten some other member, forcing that member to be the next stranger he’ll fight. So the 11th member initiates a group-destroying slapstick routine.
Now you see why the 11th wolf we dropped inside the fence is very dead very quickly. Or some other member is. 11 simply doesn’t work.
Full Pack Kills Babies
There’s another way to get to 11 members—and to be forced to deal with those exact same problems: have babies. Which wolves tend to do. So either the babies (or the elderly) will have to be killed, or the females will have to ovulate less, or both. It’s sad, but that’s the way it works. Natural selection won’t have it any other way.
Lack of Land Causes Checkerboard Pattern of Packs
Now, let’s say we expand the fence so that it’s big enough to hold exactly 64 packs of wolves. Then we drop in 63 more max-packs of wolves. I’m choosing 64 because that’s the number of squares on a checkerboard.
Despite the extreme crowding, things will get sorted out such that everybody’s happy so long as borders are respected, and they will be respected because avoiding violence is the number one priority for the pack once it has all the land/food it needs. The borders between the packs are maintained with the sweet smell of urine, and life is good for all the wolves. As long as the food holds out, this scenario can and will go on forever. No pack can improve its situation by “conquering” another pack because it wouldn’t be able to remember any of the new members without forgetting some of the old. So it must just settle for either infanticide or ovulation regulation.
OK. I’ve now finished painting the picture I needed the wolves for. But before we leave them behind, I want to emphasize one final point. Although the packs are happy in this arrangement, each is absolutely trapped inside a checkerboard square at this point. Their whole world is their 5 square miles. They have no idea whether or not the neighboring packs have a better piece of land because to go there and look would be to risk death.
“Ideally”, they would escape their checkerboard square by joining forces with one of the neighboring packs and going on a rampage together killing all the other packs. But they can’t magically change their brains to be able to remember more than 9 members. Nor can they change the hard realities that determine sizes of defensible land. Nor can they just switch over to communism, ditching the dominance hierarchy.
However, if wolves could think, then maybe they could think of a way to grow the pack without having to change the unchangeable 10-member limit. Maybe they could think of a way to bury that (instinctive) limit (and the fear it triggers) so far beneath a mountain of belief that it became inconsequential. Most of the time anyway.
How Religion Works
Religion Solves 151+
Unlike wolves, humans can think, and that’s just what we did about 12,000 years ago to overcome our own—150-member—limit. Which brings us to the definition of religion I want to convince you of in the rest of this post:
Religion is whatever allows groups of 151+ humans to exist.
From here on out, try to forget what the word religion used to mean to you and try to go with this new definition. In a bit, we’ll get to your current definition (as I imagine it to be) and see how it fits into things. But more interestingly, we’ll also get to the religion you’re a true believer of today. Because as a member of a 151+ group, you most definitely are a true believer of a religion.
Life Was Simple Before 151
For the millions of years our human and animal ancestors lived together in groups of 150 or less, life was oh so simple. Only one law was ever needed: Might makes right. All behavior was as automatic as breathing is to us now. Pleasure and pain defined a moral landscape almost nobody failed to navigate perfectly. Social instruction consisted of doing what comes naturally and having the group slap and groom you perfectly into place. Stray unadvisedly and get slapped back.
But, as we saw with the wolves, for this all to work correctly, every member of the group needs to be able to remember every other member of the group; dominance hierarchies can’t function efficiently without this property. And given that there’s only so much of the brain that can be allocated to remembering people before other parts of the brain begin to suffer, a maximum number needed to be selected and henceforth provided to every human. That number turned out to be 150. It’s the same number for chimpanzees, interestingly enough, as we saw in the Abstract.
So, for a few thousand years humanity was organized into continually-splitting groups of 150. It was growth by cell division. In such an environment, languages proliferated: groups couldn’t communicate with neighboring groups without breaking their own dominance hierarchies. Physically, the groups were right on top of each other, but culturally they drifted so far apart that effective communication was impossible.
What is the evidence for this locked-in-at-150 stage of human evolution (that I am proposing)? The mandatory-group-splits-at-150 for religion-less groups (only) has been documented in New Guinea in modern times, and there are still 800 languages there.
Here’s the conundrum religion was needed for. Natural selection had walked itself into a very powerful trap. It needed to come up with a human that feared strangers (out-group enemies) and didn’t fear strangers (in-group unknowns). Prying open that trap and keeping it from snapping shut would require a meme so monstrous it would loom over all other memes like a mountain over mole hills.
Wherein I Attempt to Cool Your Jets
I swear, I’m not trying to make you angry with what follows. So, before I start in on how religion works, let me remind you that according to my definition of religion, EVERY society with more than 150 members has a religion, MUST have a religion. And as we’ll soon see, every member of those societies MUST be a true believer of that religion, or else keep very, very quiet. That means that you and I, even if we think of ourselves as supremely secular, are true believers of some religion. And that’s a good thing! Large societies can’t exist without religions!
So, by all means, stay proud of—and true to—your religion, whatever it is. Your commitment benefits yourself and all those who share your beliefs. I am unabashedly pro-religion.
Religion Recipe
The definition of religion I proposed earlier starts with “Religion is whatever allows…”, which opens the door for lots of different ways to get people into groups of 151+. But so far there’s only been one solution to the 150 trap: mass delusion.
You start by brainwashing all the children into believing that strangers are not as dangerous as they appear to be. It takes a very seductive story and many generations to get the stranger delusion to take hold across the whole group, but once it does, it’s no longer a delusion. It’s the truth, and all members will work to defend that truth because…it’s the glue that allows the group to exist.
The rest of the steps in the religion recipe are child’s play compared to that first giant one of getting strangers into the group in the first place. The rest of the steps all run fuzzy and infinite, making them all huge pains in the ass, but it’s all just administration in the end.
Step One: Brainwash the Children
Step one is to fool the children into thinking they shouldn’t run away from strangers. They should assume strangers are friendly until proven otherwise. It seems an easy task in today’s society because we have religion. But back before religion it was similar to assuming crocodiles are friendly. Easier said than done. Especially when you feel the fear in your parents. So, I ask you, what prize can be offered to a child to get her to pet the crocodile? I’m sure lots of things were tried, but the promise of an afterlife turned out to be the real winner. We’ll talk more about that later.
Step Two: Define and Enforce The Rules
Step two is to teach the children how to behave in a society that includes strangers. Humans, like all primates, have a deeply innate obsession with fairness, to which strangers pose a huge problem because they can’t be tracked. Who (or what) can we turn to then to define the rules of behavior for untrackable strangers? Well, the only expert at defining behavior, of any kind, going back all the way to the very beginning of behavior itself, was natural selection. But natural selection is supremely unavailable for the job—it’s natural selection’s own 150-based solution that needs to be overridden. The only applicant for the job is rationality, and despite being in way, way, way over its head in the infinite ocean of complexity that is human behavior, it gets the job.
Once in office, rationality’s only workable option is to designate a moral North Star, to declare a standard by which all behavior shall be judged. We’ll call it a touchstone. Once the touchstone is in place, rationality can just let the group run with it, defining the rules over time as needed, each rule shaped by its (community-argued) conformity—or nonconformity—to the touchstone.
The winning touchstone in the world today is essentially the same in all religions: be as nice to other people as you expect them to be nice to you. The Golden Rule. However, and this is critical, each religion works out exactly what “be nice” means on its own. It should be totally obvious that each religion must guess at its definition. There’s simply no way to know for every corner case just which behavior is “nicest”. Look no further than abortion.
But decisions must be made, and the arbitrariness inherent in the decisions that are made will differentiate the religions. And as wonky as some of those decisions may seem, they matter. They totally matter. Each decision defining “being nice” contributes to the landscape that ultimately determines the coordination algorithm for the group. Which, like everything else, gets tested in war.
Unfortunately, unlike the “might” in might-makes-right, defining “nice” is infinitely complex, leading to endless in-fighting over what proper behavior should be. It all quickly balloons out into a full-fledged legal system and police force. And a very shitty Internet. But there’s just no way around it.
Allow me to emphasize this point: Law isn’t separate from religion; law is religion, or rather the parts of a religion that have been spelled out and written down. The Bible was a loosely written law book.
Religion is the rules of behavior for the (151+) group, nothing more and nothing less. (We’ll get to all the gods and spirituality and all that in just a bit.) Most of the rules are unwritten; we call those rules culture.
# Both law and culture conform to the touchstone
religion = law + culture # as I'm defining religionClarification Interlude
Summarizing so far, to get a religion you must first delude everyone (starting with the children) about the true danger of strangers and then define the rules of behavior for living among strangers based on the delusion you chose. Otherwise the delusion won’t hold. So you’re stuck with the delusion you choose, for better and for worse.
The inevitable contradictions arise. If God is all-powerful, why does He let people starve? The life of the child or the life of the mother? Can God create a stone so heavy that He Himself can’t lift it? Should we send the trolley down this track or that one? These uncrackable chestnuts are dead giveaways that the whole enterprise is entirely contrived. But we tell ourselves that the truth about proper human behavior is written into the fabric of the universe and most certainly can be arrived at with just a bit more reasoning—or self-righteousness. (Spoiler alert: it’s not and it can’t be. Morality shapes itself to the environment. That pesky little side issue—survival—requires it to.)
Step Three: Burn at the Stake
Step three is to deal with apostates. Non-believers can be tolerated only so long as they never reveal their disbelief. Once they throw shade on the rules with their loose language or loose behavior, they poison the whole endeavor. With the whole group laboring mightily to firm up a delusional dam that holds back the truth about strangers, cracks in that dam must be quickly eliminated. Known non-believers must be dungeoned, exiled or killed. Their fates can be handled surreptitiously, extra-legally, in the middle of the night, or they can be handled legally, in the light of day—with trumped-up charges if necessary. But however it’s done, it must drive fear into the hearts of all other lurking non-believers. It sounds mean, and it sounds wrong, but it must be done. Mass delusions are very fragile things.
Step Four: Propagate the Propaganda
Step four is to constantly reinforce the delusion, and push updates to it. If yesterday homosexuals were wicked immoral perverts, and today they’re kindergarten teachers, how exactly is that achieved? A propaganda infrastructure is required. We prefer to call it entertainment when it’s our own internal propaganda being dished out to us, but propaganda it is. And we absolutely need and crave it. The animal half of the human brain (unconsciousness) can’t incorporate updates to the moral landscape with just a memo, even an exquisitely-written one. It needs to be trained with a thousand stories. Entertainment provides those stories.
Back in the day, almost nobody could read. So they had to travel to a place of worship to get their moral propaganda read to them. Mosque, temple, church. Bible.
Today, we just watch Netflix. For the exact same reasons. You may think that Bible stories are lame and preachy but I assure you they were the blockbusters of their times. The movies we love today, with the underdogs who somehow, miraculously, manage to come out on top every single time, will be absolute schlock in 50 years. I guarantee it. In 2000 years? Ha. They’ll prefer Bible stories to what we’re churning out.
Their favorite scene so far, the one that will get the biggest laugh, will be the one with Matt Damon gardening on Mars. “This was how many years after Darwin?”, they’ll ask. “150? No way!!! How impossibly deluded they still were about themselves and their relationship to reality!”
Religion, Versions 1 Through 3
We’re currently living with version 2.0 of religion. But let’s take them in order.
Version Touchstone Enforcer Follower
1.0 Afterlife God Christian, Muslim, etc.
2.0 Sacred Life Conscience Humanist
3.0 Transparency AI DeterministReligion 1.0
For thousands of years humanity flourished under the delusion of an afterlife. God got all the publicity, but He was just the bouncer at the door. The real pull for believers was not the comfort of God watching over them in this life—(Truth be told, He didn’t seem all that interested.)—but rather His promise of a sweet next life—(For patiently enduring the nonstop pain and bullshit in this one).
And let there be no doubt about it, this meme—the afterlife meme—is the greatest meme of all time. Hands down. No meme delivered a better way of getting large groups of humans to cooperate (and win wars) than getting them to believe in the afterlife. The afterlife meme rampaged the earth, trapping and swallowing and converting all societies bound by weaker memes.
And then it tripped over science, broke its hip, and will never walk again. The promise of an afterlife lost its shine amid the stink of all the explanations the holy books got wrong. Positing just a few thousand years since the beginning of time turned out to be a wholly indefensible underestimate. ‘Long, long ago’ would have served just fine. Mass delusions need to be kept pristine.
Religion 2.0
I need to make an important point before we get into the details of religion 2.0 (humanism). And that point is that version 1.0 religions are mostly legacy religions now. Except for a few possible exceptions, like Sharia law under the Taliban, no modern society lives by the rules laid out in the 1.0 holy books, which, as I’ve already said, were literally their law books. Christianity, Islam and Judaism are now by-and-large 1.0 cultural wrappers around the 2.0 religion, humanism. A society’s religion is the law and culture it enforces.
Now, let’s check off each of the steps in the religion recipe for humanism.
Brainwash the Children
We bombard our children with morality tales right from the start. Each story demonstrates good behavior, and all stories have happy endings. The children are expected to emulate the behavior demonstrated in the stories. If they don’t, we do our best to make sure they do by depriving them of our love, or threatening to.
But why do they need such instruction? Why aren’t they born with an instinctive love and respect for all humans? And why do the stories all have happy endings? We’re undeniably manipulating our children with false impressions of how the world works. We say it’s for their own good, and it is, but only indirectly. Directly, it’s for the good of the group. Every moral lesson boils down to the same thing: “Stop being so selfish; be nicer to the group; or it will turn on you”. What humans fear—what every social creature fears—is the group—because the group can attack and abandon. Gods are merely proxies for the group. Otherwise, how do you explain the gods’ obsession with group behavior? You’re all-knowing and all-powerful and your only hobby is making sure humans do right by the group?
Children today still require the brainwashing because they are still being born with stranger-fearing, might-makes-right hardware that won’t work in modern societies. So we teach them how to not fear strangers by convincing them that deep down every person (every person in their in-groups, anyway) is essentially a good person.
And how do we fool ourselves into believing we’re not brainwashing our children? By remaining absolutely certain of one thing: the touchstone. We humanists are unable to doubt that human life is sacred. We remain convinced that all people are essentially good by never doubting that we are in possession of the truth and are simply imparting it to our children.
Define and Enforce the Rules
We have systems of law, with each law justified by its conformance to sacred human life. We have courts and prisons to make sure people treat human life as sacred by following those laws. The Internet is little more than a giant fight over the definition of proper behavior. This is all pretty straightforward.
Sacred life in my country, the USA, goes by the code name “all men are created equal.” But if all men are equal, what is the value/price that they are equal at? Only one value/price works in practice: infinity. At any other price a human life could be purchased, which gets us back to slavery. Infinite value (or “priceless”, if you prefer) is what sacred means.
Burn at the Stake
Some people do question universal sacred human life, and we treat them as infidels. Nazis can be punched. Racists are canceled and isolated. Abortionists, cloners, and eugenicists all cause the telltale sign of the true believer to leach out: self-righteousness. (The fangs!)
Yes, we stop short of killing, but only because it’s hypocritical to the touchstone. Ostracizing gets the job done just fine.
Propagate the Propaganda
You will laugh when I say Hollywood is our Mecca, but it’s true. We look to it for all the latest behavioral updates. The movies and shows can be scary or funny or romantic, but in the end the thrill we get watching them is a moral one. We NEED to know who the good guys are and who the bad guys are so that we can ride that moral roller coaster. The movie ALWAYS puts the underdog good guys into a situation right before the end where they can’t possibly win, and then OMG!!! they pull it out and justice is properly served to one and all. It’s the same ole ride every time. We expect, demand and enjoy that ride. We walk out of the theater morally fortified. We’re truly better people for our societies leaving the theater than we were going in. We know the rules better! And the rules are always changing.
So, tell me, what’s the difference between us today watching some superhero slay some supervillain, and our ancestors, three thousand years ago, hearing the holy man read the gripping story of the underdog David slaying the invincible bully Goliath? Only one thing. Goliath must be killed because God wants it. The supervillain must be killed because he doesn’t respect the sanctity of human life.
Face the Humanist Facts
You and I are true believers in humanism. We deeply believe that human life is sacred (it isn’t), that love conquers all (it doesn’t) and that we’re headed towards an ultimate future in which all humans live in one big happy group (we aren’t and we won’t).
We push human rights on other cultures just like Christians pushed Jesus on them. And just like the Christians, we’re convinced we’re in possession of the truth, and other cultures are not. Oh, but this time, it’s different, we tell ourselves; this time we really do have the truth. We know, beyond a doubt, that the elimination of human suffering is the answer. And how do we know? Well, it’s just so damned obvious!
Yes, but it’s always obvious. This is the human condition. I assure you that when the world was overrun with slavery it was obvious that there must be slaves, that when doctors bled patients it was obvious it healed them, and that when children were sacrificed it was obvious that it pleased the gods. We’re simply not in a position to be judging what’s obvious and what isn’t. And if you think we are, then you’re a deeply religious person.
Humanism is a gambit, nothing more and nothing less. Sacred human life is a very, very new idea, completely overlooked for almost all of human history, and for a very good reason: there’s no evidence for it. Humans live and die just like all other animals live and die, just like all other living things live and die. The earth does not rock on its axis when a human is born or a human dies. There is no signal whatsoever that human life is special in any way. The sanctity is all in our heads. And if my saying that makes you angry, then you’re a deeply religious person. And I’m so glad you are because I am too, which makes it possible for us to smile at each other when we pass on the street without knowing who the other is.
Treating human life as sacred has certainly been wildly advantageous, but that doesn’t entail that human life actually is sacred. Belief in the afterlife was also wildly advantageous, but that didn’t entail the afterlife existed.
The chameleon morality we call humanism has been the undisputed winning societal strategy for the past several hundred years, but it’s unlikely to be the winning strategy forever and ever and ever.
Atheists think gods are ridiculous. Determinists will think sacred life is ridiculous.
Religion 3.0
Doom of Religion 2.0
Science has humanism in its sights. With each passing day, some new mystery of the universe is explained away with mathematics, revealing it to be just another case of cause-and-effect. And now there are very few mysteries left, and even those are getting increasingly less mysterious every day. The ineffability of consciousness will be the last refuge of the humanist, if it isn’t already.
Every year philosophers come out with yet more books on the existence, or non-existence, of free will. And we all know how this kind of argument ends. If free will were standing on solid ground, there would be no need to defend it. Nobody writes books defending the existence of gravity. Free will will fall.
And free will is at the very foundation of the sacred life story. If humans don’t have the freedom to choose how they behave, then they can’t be blamed for their bad behavior. And without blame, there is no morality game. How do you sell sacred life without stories in which good guys and bad guys are choosing to be good and bad?
And it doesn’t matter that you absolutely KNOW, deep down in your soul, that free will exists because you can just feel it. At one point in our history virtually everyone absolutely KNEW (and just felt) that God existed. But not everyone does today. It always turns out that the things that we just know (are true) are exactly those beliefs that are shared by all members of the group. They feel undeniably true because they’re universally believed. But truth and belief are very, very different things. Even universal belief doesn’t entail truth. In fact, it rarely does. Yesterday’s truth is today’s mythology; yesterday’s medicine is today’s quackery. Free will might seem like an essential part of consciousness but that’s only because everybody believes it to be. It’s easy to get small children to believe just about anything, and when done right, whatever it is that you convince them of sticks around clear through adulthood.
Each one of us was convinced of free will as a small child and there is no incentive for us to question it as adults. But the fact remains that we don’t even know the names of the muscles. Your phone slips from your hand and you catch before you know you dropped it. Did you give that command? How could we possibly be in control of what our bodies are doing? We also don’t know the rules of grammar, but use them perfectly. Nor do we choose which thoughts we think. So in what way exactly do we have free will? Are we approving or disapproving of every single muscle movement and thought just before it happens? It certainly doesn’t feel that way to me. That sounds overwhelming. My fingers type faster than I can approve their choices. It should already be way beyond obvious that we’re observing what we do and then convincing ourselves after the fact that we chose to do what we did. And soon enough it will be obvious—to some generation that’s not that far in the future.
A world with no free will presents a very big problem for humanity. If children can no longer be convinced that they control their own behavior, and they start dismissing our barrage of uplifting Good-Samaritan morality tales, how will they learn to trust strangers? Unlike Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother, they will clearly see the stranger’s fangs—and their own.
What Gods Do
The crux of the human predicament has always been that we don’t naturally trust each other enough to live in large groups. God solves this problem for us by critically observing our private behavior with His omniscience. Humanism solves the problem by putting God inside us. He’s the conscience, making sure we do good by the group whenever we’re out from under the eyes of the group.
But both of these solutions depend on our belief that we’re choosing how we behave. And we aren’t! Without the delusion of free will, neither approach can work.
So…what if we could use cameras and computers to act as God? If the technology was trusted and the surveillance data made supremely public, not hidden away in a government or a corporation, there would be no question about what had happened. Each of us would have access to the replay in God’s memory, so to speak.
This transition is already happening at the fringes. As an example, soon Major League Baseball will replace the home plate umpire with an AI that calls balls and strikes. It will outperform the umpires, and strike zone arguments will end. In this scenario, the AI is very much acting as a God, seeing everything and delivering the judgments neither side bothers questioning once the kinks are worked out.
Any mutually-trusted third party is essentially a God.
It’s All About Winning Wars
We’re heading into a world in which we revere transparency, not love.
Imagine walking into some public space like a park, or a university campus, every inch of which is completely surveilled in the publicly transparent way we just discussed—everyone has access to what’s being recorded, not just the government or a corporation. Whatever the rules are for that space, you won’t be able to break them and get away with it. Your misbehavior will be caught in real time. So you’ll conform, as will everyone else. This will promote tighter cooperation. Children raised in such spaces will outperform all children who came before them.
This enhancement of cooperation is exactly what the fear of God does for us. The fear of transparency will do the job even better.
Societies without transparent spaces—and transparent systems—will be out-competed by those with them, just as societies without (moral) gods were out-competed by those with them. And by “out-competed” I mean “defeated in wars”, of course. There is no other measuring stick worth talking about. The winners don’t just write the history, they define reality because they continue to exist in it.
If some society were to achieve the bliss of true equality, however you want to define true equality, but then got its ass kicked by some society (of equal size) featuring human sacrifice, slavery, prostitution and child labor, then the true-equality society would be the inferior society. Equality—and the elimination of human suffering—is worth having only to the extent that it helps win wars. It’s nothing in and of itself.
Don’t Get Me Wrong
I’m a humanist. I think humanism is the second greatest meme of all time. I raised my kids as humanists, and hope they do the same with theirs. I would fight in a war to protect humanism. I hope humanism lives a long and fruitful life.
But I don’t think it will. While the drive to eliminate human suffering is unquestionably a winning strategy, like everything else, it only runs so deep. Why is there no solution to homelessness, or any other social problem, only tradeoffs? It’s because just being kind doesn’t magically solve all problems. Like it or not, kindness runs aground.
And when it finally runs fully aground, it could be a very messy failure mode. Consider a society that first introduces the concept of “thank you”. Cooperation improves and that society goes onto defeat all other non-thank-you societies in the wars they fight. The all-conquering thank-you society eventually splits in a civil war, resulting in two thank-you societies. Over time, continued splitting results in a world in which there are many societies, all which are thank-you societies. Some of them try to do without the thank-yous, and they lose wars, and fail to continue to exist.
And then a thank-you-you’re-welcome society emerges, and the pattern repeats, resulting in a world in which all the societies are thank-you-you’re-welcome societies.
But how deep can the back-and-forth thankfulness protocol run? At the extreme, the society gets trapped in long, drawn-out politeness loops, unable to feed themselves. They’re too busy thanking each other! Politeness runs aground.
And humanism is a macrocosm of politeness. Yes, it’s totally awesome!!! Read some Steven Pinker if you need reminding of just how awesome. But it doesn’t take us all the way to the Promised Land. Like everything else, it will have diminishing returns.
So, what this is is a call to arms. Let’s start thinking seriously about what we’re going to replace humanism with—or wrap it inside of—should it begin to run out of gas. If we’re not ready with something, we’ll devolve into groups of 150—a planet of gangs—until one of them can come up with a touchstone meme so powerful that it can kickstart a religion. And, needless to say, the afterlife and sacred-life memes won’t be available for quite some time.
So, you got anything better than Slippin Fall’s transparency brainchild?