One way to understand the difference between liberals and conservatives is to reflect on the positive and negative senses of the word “artificial.”

Primarily, the word refers to something “made by human skill; produced by humans,” in which case the artificial contrasts with the natural. This meaning isn’t so much positive as it’s neutral rather than pejorative, but we’ll see in a moment that anyone in favour of civilization should read the first sense as being based on some positive values.

The word’s remaining several senses, though, are all pejorative. Thus, “artificial” can mean:

• “imitation; simulated; sham”

• “lacking naturalness or spontaneity; forced; contrived; feigned”

• “full of affectation; affected; stilted”

• “made without regard to the particular needs of a situation, person, etc.; imposed arbitrarily; unnatural”

The relevance of this to politics is that conservatives would prefer the negative senses since, effectively, at least, they side with the natural over the artificial, which amounts to saying that they prefer animals to people, and default norms to progress.

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Nature: the conservative’s security blanket

That will sound preposterous if you think of conservatives as being institutionalists, like Edmund Burke, since institutions are human constructs. But as far as anyone can tell from the bulk of conservative policies (as opposed to the propaganda’s rhetoric, which is often misleading), conservatives are inclined to preserve only those institutions that organize people in ways that approximate primitive relations between animals.

For instance, historically, conservatives or “traditionalists” preferred medieval to modern institutions, so they preferred, for instance, monarchy to democracy. And you find in the animal kingdom that dominance hierarchies or pecking orders are natural equivalents of rigid human hierarchies. What you don’t find in groups of social animals is anything as idealistic as the equality promoted in democracies. You don’t find animals voting to accept or remove representatives, nor do you find each member of an animal group having exactly equal value to the group (with a mathematically equal vote).

Similarly, conservatives preferred feudalism to capitalism, slavery to freedom, dogma to science, craft to art, mind control to enlightenment. In each case, the “modern” option was revolutionary in departing from natural norms, which is why the period beginning with the Italian Renaissance marks an upgrade of behavioural modernity itself, the advent of culture some 50 to 100,000 years ago. The reason conservatives resisted these transformational niches, and thus opposed world-historic modernity in general, is that they saw such deviations as affronts to the majesty of what God had supposedly wrought in nature.

In any case, as the decades and centuries passed, and modernity left medievalism behind, conservatives had to adjust their strategies and moderate some of their fears and habits. Luckily for them, modern institutions proved to have downsides — especially capitalism.

So, despite their trust in the hierarchies of castes imposed by feudalism, conservatives could work with capitalism. But this was only because laissez-faire capitalism reverts to a neofeudal arrangement, as the wealthy capitalists consolidate their power, capture the regulators, and turn the free society into a plutocracy. While capitalism left the medieval world behind, the wealthiest merchants transcended the lot of the bottom 99% of the less liberated population.

Likewise, late-modern conservatives could grudgingly cater to democratic customs, giving up the pageantry and corruption of monarchy, but only because the ancient Greeks proved to be right about democracy: this political system is vulnerable to demagogues who turn free societies into tyrannies of the duped mob.

And conservatives could appreciate the benefits of science over theology, but only because science (or the freedom of thought more generally) could be a means to an end, a way of earning profit in a capitalist market. The conservative approves of the accumulation of wealth only when wealth divides society in a quasi-natural fashion, so that the wealthy rule over the poor (regardless of whether the wealth is inherited or obtained in a competition).

Or conservatives could tolerate science in so far as science empowers our species with technology, so that people could dominate the planet in the Anthropocene, establishing an extended version of the conservative’s beloved dominance hierarchy.

For that matter, conservatives could concede that the institution of slavery is untoward, but only, again, because capitalism re-imposes virtual slavery, which appeals to the conservative’s authoritarian inclinations.

Similarly, conservatives could appreciate freedom of thought in the arts, even as this spelled disaster for theocracy, because the Pareto principle divided the results of the free exchange of ideas along the lines of that familiar Fibonacci sequence: since 80% of the outcomes derive from 20% of the causes, most ideas are rubbish, so once again a minority (of artists) could lord it over the majority.

In short, conservatives made their peace with modernity because the revolutions of liberalism were in some respects only superficial. The institutions and the propaganda changed, and enormous progress ensued, but somehow social hierarchies persisted, including the dominance of men over women, Whites over Blacks, rich over poor, the subcriminally sociopathic over the moralistic working class, and the North over the South.

If they had their druthers, however, conservatives wouldn’t approve of modern institutions. They’re thankful for how these institutions can go awry from a liberal, humanistic perspective. That is, these institutions that distinguish modernity from most ancient and medieval social norms are inherently liberal since they’re about liberating slaves, peasants, women, minorities, and the disadvantaged. Indeed, these institutions — capitalism, democracy, science, industry, freedom of thought — are supposed to promote human interests, as they harness the traits that distinguish people from animals. These institutions are driven by reason, autonomy, imagination, ingenuity, and ambition.

Thus, conservatives couldn’t identify themselves as opponents of liberals, while nevertheless approving wholeheartedly the modern institutions that applied the liberal’s secular humanist values. That would be a performative self-contradiction. Where conservatives distinguish themselves from liberals is in co-signing not these institutions themselves, or their implicit humanism, but the natural, animalistic outcomes of these revolutions when the latter go wrong for liberals.

In other words, conservatives cheer for modernity’s failure, or they scheme to sabotage the humanist potential of liberal institutions, hoping that such progress can serve only as a mask worn over nature’s wilder productivity.

Humanism and the merit of artificiality

But let’s return to the neutral meaning of “artificial.” We need merely ask ourselves why our species would bother to preoccupy itself with the results of its skill, to recognize the underlying positive value. Some animals also use tools, but no animal species is capable of our prodigious range of inventions. Whereas animals are generally confined to only one type of habitat, we adapt to all the planet’s environments because we can bring a plethora of tools to bear to solve our problems.

Again, why would we come to specialize in artificiality, in imagining alternatives, applying logic and careful observation, and building things not found in nature? Is this a value-neutral enterprise, something we just happen to do, or do we prize the artificial above all else?

Consider the subgenre of postapocalyptic fiction to arrive at an answer. Notice the plight of those who manage to survive the world’s apocalyptic demise: as the years go by, technology corrodes, and there’s no longer science, industry, or the economic and political institutions needed to drive or sustain that kind of progress. The survivors are reduced to a primitive lifestyle of foraging for resources and defending themselves against predators. Indeed, these survivors will have returned to what classic liberals like John Locke and Thomas Hobbes called the brutal “state of nature,” in which life is “nasty, brutish, and short.”

So, the value of artificiality, of the use of our civilizing traits that make us people rather than just animals — that is, people that are biologically animals but socially and culturally godlike — is that this know-how extracts us from the wilderness. We use our tools to transcend the state of nature, to build civilizations that are driven by cultural ideals to which nature is blind.

Liberals, then, are those who adopt a humanist perspective that recognizes the implicit positivity of the artificial over the natural. They approve of civilized progress, and they think our species has special rights because personhood is a precious anomaly in the animal kingdom.

Implicitly, at least, conservatives disagree with all of that since their policies entail a preference for animality over personhood. They don’t respect human rights but only those who prevail in various naturally established struggles for scarce resources. Liberals seek progress in aiding those who may have fallen behind, such as women, the poor, or non-Whites, whereas conservatives respect not humanity as such, but the dominators, such as men, the rich, and the Whites.

Friedrich Nietzsche gave away the conservative’s game when he conceived of life in the crude terms of a power struggle, leading to “orders of rank” and underhanded stratagems by which the weak attempt to dethrone the strong. The invention of altruistic, “slave” morality itself was one such tactic. This social Darwinism is the essence of modern conservatism, just as it’s been the aristocrat’s prejudice for millennia. Conservatives use religious language to excuse the naturalness of the social arrangements that appeal to them, and this is the prevailing ruse of Nietzsche’s dominator class, the Übermenschen.

For Nietzsche, we ought to reconcile ourselves to the harsh facts of natural life, and those who relish the power struggle may obtain the freedom to create not just tools but cultures and lifestyles. Ancient noble classes did just this with religion: they conceived of a state theology, such as some polytheistic mythos, to provide a rationale for the nobility’s power over slaves and peasants. After all, the politically useful religions feature myriad tales of how unscrupulous and even tyrannical gods toy with humanity.

The upshot is that conservatism entails the negative sense of “artificial” since conservatives prefer wildlife to the so-called sinful pride of defying the “God-given” norms of savagery and hegemony.

By contrast, liberalism entails the word’s neutral sense that presupposes a positive one. That is, the primary sense is neutral only because we take the humanist ideology for granted, forgetting that without our liberated mindsets and tools, civilization would be no more and we’d be reduced to the natural state of having to live like tribal primates.

Some political ideologies ought to be beyond the pale because they threaten the social order that’s proved to be constructive in the big picture of history. For instance, overt communism and fascism took themselves out of the running for most countries in the twentieth century, thanks to their spectacular failures and the atrocities it took to attempt to sustain them.

Instead, a humanistic ethos guides the science-driven social order that the developed world takes for granted. And humanists think of people as being naturally special. Eventually, our species dominated the planet due to our general intelligence and creativity, which have the potential to liberate each of us — if only oppressive regimes would get out of our way. The humanist’s mission is one of liberation: the freeing of our species from the inhuman clutches of wild nature, and of every person to support his or her godlike ability to think and act as an autonomous agent that seeks happiness.

One downside of humanism, though, is that humanists might overlook threats by overemphasizing the commonalities that are supposed to unite us in our liberal pursuits. We think we see these threats more clearly, depending on where we fall on the so-called political spectrum. Even communism and fascism are on this spectrum of options for organizing a society, along with the offshoots of liberalism and conservatism.

According to this model, politics is like a body that can turn either left or right, or that can use its left or its right hand. Each side is conceived of as being equal in that they’re inherently valid and respectable since they’re stitched into a common, underlying fabric of options; after all, they both emerge from human thought and behaviour, so they’re bound by humanism. A humanist must affirm that the basic traits of personhood can express themselves in liberal or conservative forms.

And of course, there’s no trouble in accommodating liberalism in this way since the unifying framework of humanism is practically synonymous with liberalism. Liberals and conservatives are all people, so for the sake of political correctness, we can overlook or tolerate our superficial differences and emphasize what we have in common. In this case, both liberals and conservatives are engaged in a political discourse, so in that respect, both sides of the “aisle” or political spectrum are validated.

This is the same liberalizing move that awards civil rights to anyone on the spectrum of sexual orientations, genders, or personalities. We’re all just going our personally distinct ways, pursuing our happiness in political, economic, or professional terms, and tolerating each other’s differences, as prescribed by the liberal ethos.

This equality is a mirage, though, if we presuppose the legitimacy not just of politics, but of the progressive social order that makes for historical modernity, the kind that drives the institutions of science, capitalism, democracy, and freedom in the arts. In that case, liberalism is the political default, and illiberalism must be anti-modern and indeed anti-human, which is to say that “conservatives” are threats to human progress who don’t belong squarely in the humanist spectrum, after all.

To conceal this disturbing recognition, we’d need more than just the handy rhetorical device of the unifying “spectrum” of societal possibilities. We’d need a moderate way to define “conservatism,” one that uses euphemisms to hide the regressive implications of this political anachronism.

Britannica’s outline of conservatism

Let’s look, for instance, at how Encyclopedia Britannica lays out the meaning of this “right-wing political option.” According to that article, conservatism is just a “political doctrine that emphasizes the value of traditional institutions and practices.” And who could argue with something so innocuous? Conservatives have “values” and “traditions,” just like everyone else. This conception of conservatism is practically anthropological, due to its neutrality.

More precisely, though, “Conservatism is a preference for the historically inherited rather than the abstract and ideal. This preference has traditionally rested on an organic conception of society,” one that casts a society, then, as a giant family held together by a larger-scale version of the natural hierarchy that distinguishes parents from their children.

For that reason, conservatives “favour institutions and practices that have evolved gradually and are manifestations of continuity and stability.” Just as the family unit owes its stability to its long evolution, the same can be said for the civilized norms that lasted for millennia. To protect these naturally stable, “organic” hierarchies,

Government’s responsibility is to be the servant, not the master, of existing ways of life, and politicians must therefore resist the temptation to transform society and politics. This suspicion of government activism distinguishes conservatism not only from radical forms of political thought but also from liberalism, which is a modernizing, antitraditionalist movement dedicated to correcting the evils and abuses resulting from the misuse of social and political power.

The difference between liberalism and conservatism, according to this venerable encyclopedia, is that liberals trust in human nature to develop institutions to improve our condition. Hence the innovations of science, law, capitalism, democracy, technology, and art which improved on theocratic dogmatism, feudalism, despotism, patriarchy, xenophobia, stagnation, and so on.

By contrast, conservatives trust in “organic stabilities and traditions.” Rather than privileging human rights, conservatives want to protect these evolved social structures.

Again, that language is diplomatic, which means Britannica is implicitly liberal so that its article on conservatism is written to tolerate this form of politics. (In fact, this encyclopedia has a modernist ethos, owing to its Enlightenment origin.)

The article goes on to say that “A common way of distinguishing conservatism from both liberalism and radicalism is to say that conservatives reject the optimistic view that human beings can be morally improved through political and social change.” Thus, “Far from believing that human nature is essentially good or that human beings are fundamentally rational, conservatives tend to assume that human beings are driven by their passions and desires — and are therefore naturally prone to selfishness, anarchy, irrationality, and violence. Accordingly, conservatives look to traditional political and cultural institutions to curb humans’ base and destructive instincts.”

Tellingly, the article adds, “Conservatism is as much a matter of temperament as of doctrine,” and the article highlights two aspects of the conservative character. “The first is a distrust of human nature, rootlessness (social disconnectedness), and untested innovations, together with a corresponding trust in unbroken historical continuity and in the traditional frameworks for conducting human affairs.”

The second is “an aversion to abstract argument and theorizing. Attempts by philosophers and revolutionaries to plan society, using political principles purportedly derived from reason alone, are misguided and likely to end in disaster, conservatives say.”

Consequently, ‘In opposition to the “rationalist blueprints” of liberals and radicals, conservatives often insist that societies are so complex that there is no reliable and predictable connection between what governments try to do and what actually happens. It is therefore futile and dangerous, they believe, for governments to interfere with social or economic realities.’

Notice that in so far as conservatism is a temperament that explicitly repudiates philosophical abstraction and reflection, there can be no such thing as a conservative philosophy. On principle or at least on temperament, a conservative ought to reject philosophy outright.

But we can go further in reading between Britannica’s diplomatic lines, and ask what conservatism’s upshot must be, given the specific social norms that have historically prevailed. To say that we ought to defer to “tradition” is one thing. Identifying the set of traditions that conservatives tend to prefer is another.

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The conservative’s repudiation of humanism

So, if we take an overview of history, we find two predominant periods before that of modernity and the ascent of liberalism.

The first is the prehistoric period in which early humans lived mainly in nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers. As far as we can tell from anthropological evidence and extrapolation, those bands would have been relatively egalitarian rather than hierarchical. In The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow highlight the irony that early modern liberals were inspired not just by the European rediscovery of the Americas, but by the liberal, practically anarchical attitudes of the Indigenous American tribes.

The second distinctive premodern period, separated from prehistory by a transitional one, was the civilized norm in which larger, agrarian populations lived in sedentary city-states, kingdoms, or empires. These later societies were divided into castes, with aristocratic masters ruling over servile classes, treating the latter like herds of domesticated animals.

Clearly, modern conservatives look to the second rather than the first social norm for their natural traditions. According to the conservative’s logic and prizing of stability, however, the conservative ought to prefer the prehistoric nomadic lifestyle since it was much more stable than the states that rose and fell. Early humans lived in nomadic tribes for hundreds of thousands of years in the Stone Age, whereas states typically endure for some centuries or millennia at most, and states generally have been around for only 6,000 years.

Already, then, we see an inconsistency in the conservative temperament. In at least one crucial respect, the civilized lifestyle represented an advance on the nomadic one: civilization puts to work the anomalous human mode of cognition in a daring, Promethean fashion, the point being to terraform the wilderness, to produce an artificial refuge governed by human ideals, not by the imposition of naturally evolved constraints.

This is to say that even monarchy, feudalism, theocracy, patriarchy, and slavery were steps on the way to secular humanism. Compared to the organization of nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers, which is closer to that of other primate groups such as chimpanzees, the city-state is as anomalous as personhood since the state marks a revolt against the wild. Hunter-gatherers lived in nature with the other animal species, whereas civilized people domesticated plants and animals, walled themselves off from nature, and upheld cultural rather than natural laws.

The cognitive revolutions that marked people as an anomalous genus (Homo) were socially implemented in a civilizational rebellion against nature’s evident impersonality. For instance, the nobles saw themselves as culturally advanced and godlike, and were untroubled by their practice of enslaving the lower classes because they deemed the latter to be mere uncultivated animals. The unsoundness of that judgment isn’t the point since what that nearly universal ancient practice of slavery indicated was the dawning of the protoliberal realization that personhood differs from animality.

(True, there’s slavery in ant species, too, but even if some ants enslave other species because they implicitly deem their kingdoms superior to nature, they lack the general intelligence to apply “antism” (the equivalent of humanism) more consistently by domesticating all non-antishness, such as by developing technologies to conquer much larger game, including us.)

The main difference between premodern and modern civilizations is that the former were much less complete in their reckoning with personal self-awareness. The revolutions of so-called “modernity” and the turn to institutional science, capitalism, industry, democracy, and artistic self-expression are more consistently humanistic in their applications. It still took centuries to end patriarchy and slavery in the West, after the scientific and American revolutions, for instance, but modern thinkers were liberal, at least, in laying bare the principles of progressive humanism.

The imperative of social progress — as in an elevation from a state of wildlife — follows from the recognition that personhood differs from animality. And as we can see from Britannica’s neutral treatment of conservatism, this recognition is precisely what the conservative denies. Conservatism isn’t just illiberal, but anti-humanistic. To say that people are “driven by their passions and desires,” for instance, is to lump people in with animals that are driven by instincts. This amounts to deferring not so much to “organic traditions,” but the natural evolution of social structures that organize instincts, emotions, prejudices, and cognitive weaknesses.

In other words, conservatives deny that people ought to be independent from nature. If most social animals are naturally divided into dominance hierarchies because the “tradition” of the law of oligarchy establishes such stable equilibria, preventing a social collapse into chaos or total war, who are we humans to think we can do better? If people are essentially just animals, the pride we take in our civilized innovations can only be foolish.

The very social implementation of personhood would amount to our species’ “original sin,” as Christians put it. We ought to have kept obeying God and lived in the paradise of Eden, in the wild state of relative ignorance with the other animal species, as the conservative Jewish creation myth would have it. According to the Bible, civilization is a punishment, in that we’re condemned to be estranged from our Maker and from his superior handiwork, which is the wilderness, the African savannahs where we dwelled for most of the Stone Age.

What underlies Britannica’s outline, then, meaning the conservative’s preferences for “stability,” “continuity,” “tradition,” “organic” social structures like families, and the suspicion of human nature and philosophical reflection, is anti-humanism, the denial that people are special in nature. For conservatives, people are just animals.

Hence, conservatives believe or imply that we should submit to nature in politics, deferring to the order of dominance hierarchies, with the strong mastering the weak. Hence, conservative outbursts like Christian nationalism entail a return to feudal monarchies. Laissez-faire capitalism, too, generates kleptocratic, neofeudal plutocracies.

Likewise, conservatives think or imply that in our species men ought to rule over women, as adults rule over children, and that the more aggressive groups ought to conquer the territory of more docile or unharmonious groups. This should happen because it’s natural and traditional. And what best unites a troop of gullible, ignorant, storytelling primates? Religion, which is why conservatives think or imply that politics should be theocratic.

The gamut of conservative policies follows from the implicit denial of humanism, and that denial entails that people are nothing more than animals. Notice that if you find the assertion of that equivalence to be insulting, you’re a humanist at heart.

Alas, conservatives stumble into two insurmountable obstacles. First, people obviously aren’t just animals, thanks to our general intelligence. See cognitive science for the details, and study history for an overview of the anomalous Anthropocene. Humanism is based on everyone’s capacity for self-awareness, which alienates us from nature’s wild impersonality.

Second, there’s the naturalistic fallacy, which makes conservativism tawdry, sophistical, and mean-spirited. Britannica speaks of the conservative’s “value” of tradition, but to recognize that there are values is already to step outside the facts that establish nature’s wild norms. Just because natural selection generates biological functions doesn’t mean those functions are good or bad. If we deem some norm to be normative and good, we’re obliged to support that judgment with reason. But that way lies philosophy and the humanism that the conservative’s temperament rejects.

This “temperament,” too, is a euphemism for something like the authoritarian personality, and that personality is just what’s needed if you want to resort to the specious conflation of natural facts and human values. The conservative personality wants to rule or submit, viewing social relations in the primitive, animalistic terms of masters and slaves (alphas and betas) that are bound by “organic,” instinctive social structures. As Niccolo Machiavelli explained, this “realist” will leave behind morality and do whatever’s required to obtain power or submit to a worthy dominator.

Yet people can appreciate the difference between facts and values because of our general intelligence, our ability to think in abstract terms that encompass far-flung subjects. Again, that intelligence eventually led our species to systematically terraform and humanize the wilderness. Illogically, conservatives cherry-pick progressive aspects of civilization, and their fallacious rationales don’t trouble them because they’re only expressing their authoritarian, power-driven temperaments.

The rhetorical device of the political spectrum that makes conservatism seem as worthy as liberalism is a liberal ruse. The strategy is to tolerate conservatives even in developed societies and prevent their boorish personalities from erupting in authoritarian revolts. Yet the rise of Trumpism in the United States and indeed the surge of authoritarianism around the world over the last couple of decades indicate that such political correctness may have run its course.

Is basic Buddhism coherent?

By “basic Buddhism,” I mean the Four Noble Truths: Dukkha, Samudaya, Nirodha, and Magga. These principles are that life consists of suffering in the form of a cycle of disappointments; this suffering is caused by craving due to ignorance, especially about the nature of the self and everything’s interdependence; this suffering can end because the ignorance can be cured with enlightenment; and the path to enlightenment begins with the Eightfold Path.

That path disciplines the mind with right understanding, thought, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration. Thus, Buddhism isn’t supposed to be merely academic, dealing with idle abstractions that don’t affect the initiate’s life. Instead, this philosophy is pragmatic and therapeutic, the aim being to end suffering by transforming your character and mindset and reorienting your life based on a clearer understanding of what we are in the world.

Buddhism pictures the benighted egotist as being transformed eventually into an enlightened saint.

Thus, the Pali canon says, “Monks, there is one person who arises in the world for the welfare of the multitude, for the happiness of the multitude, out of compassion for the world, for the good, welfare, and happiness of devas and humans. Who is that one person? It is the Tathāgata, the Arahant, the Perfectly Enlightened One. This is that one person.”

And the Buddha says,

What, student, is the path to the company of Brahmā? Here a monk dwells pervading one quarter with a mind imbued with loving-kindness, likewise the second, likewise the third, likewise the fourth; so above, below, around, and everywhere, and to all as to himself, he dwells pervading the all-encompassing world with a mind imbued with loving-kindness, abundant, exalted, immeasurable, without hostility, and without ill will. When the liberation of mind by loving-kindness is developed in this way, no limiting action remains there, none persists there. Just as a vigorous trumpeter could make himself heard without difficulty in the four quarters, so too, when the liberation of mind by loving-kindness is developed in this way, no limiting action remains there, none persists there.

Here, the Buddha speaks of one of the four “divine abodes” or “immeasurable states.” The editor of In the Buddha’s Words explains these as

the development of loving-kindness, compassion, altruistic joy, and equanimity, which are to be extended boundlessly to all sentient beings. Briefly, loving-kindness (mett)̄ is the wish for the welfare and happiness of all beings; compassion (karuṇā), the feeling of empathy for all those afflicted with suffering; altruistic joy (muditā), the feeling of happiness at the success and good fortune of others; and equanimity (upekkh̄), a balanced reaction to joy and misery, which protects one from emotional agitation.

Clearly, Buddhist enlightenment is supposed to be compatible with morality and happiness, but that’s an understatement since the only way to enlighten yourself is supposed to be the disciplining of yourself so you turn from egotism to saintly altruism. You enlighten yourself not by studying abstract theories in a library, but by practicing morality and shedding the illusion that everything is divided by independent essences, such as your “soul.” Egoism presupposes this mistaken view of nature, a mistake that causes the clinging to unrealistic goals (samudaya) that, in turn, bring disappointment (dukkha).

As a pragmatic matter of causality, this is all plausible. If we improve our character and relinquish a self-centered view of the world that’s rationalized with the metaphysical assumption of everything’s independence and stability, we might free ourselves from needless suffering. In that case, we’d be enlightened in that we’d lack the suffering caused by the clash between reality and a self-centered view of things.

We might even explain the difference between those who choose to be Buddhists and those who reject this path by appealing to the Hindu concept of a difference in “karmic” debt. Enlightened figures who act morally are forced to do so by the progress made in their past lives.

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But this talk of causes and effects would amount to an empirical theory of how a goal might be achieved. That theory would say nothing about whether the goal ought to be achieved. Yet the Pali canon doesn’t present Buddhist teachings as dry matters of fact. The pragmatism is mixed in with implicitly normative talk of the greatness of the Buddhist goal of ending suffering or attaining enlightenment. The four divine abodes are supposed to be not just steppingstones but goods we ought to obtain. Indeed, the very name “divine abodes” implies as much.

This prescriptive, normative packaging of Buddhism could be given a cynical, pragmatic reading. Perhaps in our unenlightened state, we need to think simplistically in terms of right and wrong, to motivate us to achieve the Buddhist goals. But once we’re enlightened, we think differently, seeing the world naturally as a series of amoral causes and effects.

Indeed, this is what the Buddhist teaching of anātman implies: there’s no self in the sense of an independent essence tying together our bundle of mental states. As the empiricist David Hume would much later say, there’s just a series of states that come and go, as perceived by introspection.

Similarly, there’s no essence of tables, rocks, planets, or anything else. Everything is what it is because it’s dependent on something else. Contrary to libertarianism, then, there’s no valid reason to be self-centered. We came into the world because of what our parents did for us, and no one single-handedly achieves anything. For instance, we depend on air, food, and the ground under our feet, so the assumption that we could be absolute owners of our deeds and their results is vain.

Yet if the essential self is a figment, and we come to realize as much as we undergo the Buddhist transformation, we lose the rationale for moral evaluations. Positing the supernatural spirit or soul is supposed to ground morality in the traditional, religious sense. The reason some things are good, and others are bad, is that nature isn’t all there is; on top of nature, there’s supernature, the realm of the gods. If we restrict our knowledge to what we can sense in mindful states, we have no basis for distinguishing between right and wrong because everything would be natural and transient. As Hume points out, we never perceive the rightness or wrongness of any event.

In this case, Buddhism would be committed to a double truth doctrine in that there would be an exoteric, moralistic discourse for the unenlightened, and an esoteric, pragmatic, and naturalistic way of speaking for the enlightened. Buddhists might resort to moralistic shortcuts to present their views to non-Buddhists, but they’d be committed only to the inner, empiricist logic of amoral, “empty” causality.

To be sure, if you follow the Buddhist path, you will likely achieve the goal of transforming your mindset. The effect will follow the cause. But only the unenlightened who are still beholden to a grandiose conception of the self would want to achieve a goal in the first place, since they’d still think some events are inherently better than others.

The doctrine of karma doesn’t help much here because it’s dubious on naturalistic, scientific grounds and it’s tainted with normative evaluations. Saying that some of us are forced by our past lives to act a certain way is different from assuming that some ways of acting are better than others.

If we don’t eliminate the normativity of Buddhist goals so that we retain only the pragmatic, empiricist perspective on the all-pervasiveness of interdependent causality, we’re left with the apparent contradiction, roughly, between Buddhism’s nascent, austere naturalism and the normative assumptions that Buddhists inherit from Hinduism.

Partly, I suspect, this incoherence is implicit in the quasi-Pythagorean resort to hierarchies and enumeration you find all over ancient Indian thought. There are the four noble truths, the eightfold path, the four divine abodes, the seven factors of enlightenment, the four establishments of mindfulness, and so on and so forth. Implicitly, as I say elsewhere, Hindus seem to revere not just Brahman or any mystical unity, but the human ability to encompass everything with a systematic schema. And as the Presocratic Greek philosopher Pythagoras said, being likely influenced by Indian sages, everything is made of numbers and mathematical relationships.

That’s the naturalistic side of Hinduism, but this rational system-building often implies a hierarchy and thus a value judgment. You proceed from lower to higher stages, for example. Plato likewise developed Pythagoras’s structuralism and distinguished between matter and form. Platonic dualism was based not just on rationalism, but on an Orphic value judgment: one world is better than another, and although we’re imprisoned in the worse, material one, we belong in the better, mathematically perfect world. Thus, the path of philosophical enlightenment is normative and supposedly grounded in a disinterested assessment of facts.

In any case, the Buddhist seems committed to two very different claims:

• (1) A certain character-building discipline will make you compassionate, kind, and so on, as a matter of causal fact.

• (2) Compassion, kindness, and so on are goods that ought to be achieved, in which case we ought to be Buddhists.

The naturalism and empiricist nominalism (denial of abstract objects, based on deference to the senses) that support (1) undermine (2), and religious or other naïve rationales for (2) will conflict with the rational methods that inform (1).

What’s needed is a naturalistic basis of morality, which I think is available but not so clearly found in basic Buddhism.

Buddhas are supposed to be serene, blissful, and tranquil, but why exactly? Why is the state of nirvana one we ought to be seeking? How is enlightenment a psychologically positive condition, according to this kind of Eastern philosophy?

Blissful relief as the default mental state

In her book Doubt, Jennifer Michael Hecht provides a well-written explanation in her summary of Buddhism:

Yet the Buddha said that once you do manage to get rid of your sense of self, the truth of the universe is yours. You are no longer living from a single vantage point. Since you are not a separate self, your compassion is limitless; you are all compassion, all empathy, because not being you entails being everything else: since we are not at all separate, we must be all.

She elaborates:

A related and equally important concept is that everything in the world we know is constantly coming into being or disappearing, and it is all basically made of the same stuff. There are no true nouns, then, only verbs. As a billion various ocean waves are all in fact water, wave-ing, so the water is just the universe ocean-ing — holding in the form of water. The part of the universe that is you, is really just “you-ing” right now. There is no reason to fear anything, or to take pride only in those things particular to you, because there is no you, there is just a momentarily you-ing universe from which you could not be separated any more than an ocean wave can be separated from the water. The terrible separation of death and the alienation of individuals within communities and within the vast universe — these ruptures don’t exist in reality. We are tricked by the default time frame of our minds, so we do not see the flow of a oneness. With a lot of work, we can reconfigure our default settings so that we see things as they really are: flowing, timeless, interconnected. It leaves one bemused, gentle, and unflappable.

Again, regarding the bliss of enlightenment, the goal is “to be able clearly to see and hear the human beings around us.” In that case,

This situation of ours is bliss, said the Buddha, and we are already there. If you can root out the sense of self entirely (and the best way to do that is to go looking for the self), you find you are a collection of thoughts amid the universe, with nothing to do but be delighted with that surprising truth, and with the whole range of experience, without preference, without hurry, without dread. Every moment is a marvel of being. One gets to this state by practicing it…The world is in constant flux — it all changes all the time, mountains melt, universes collapse — all we have to do is learn to accept it.

Similarly, if you ask the Google’s large language model Gemini why buddhas are supposed to feel bliss or happiness in nirvana, you get this answer: ‘Buddhas and enlightened beings (arahants) are described as feeling bliss or happiness in Nirvana not because of sensory pleasure or emotional excitement, but because it is the complete cessation of suffering (dukkha), craving, and the “three poisons” — greed, anger, and delusion.’

Gemini elaborates:

The “Bliss of No Feeling”: When asked what is blissful about Nirvana if nothing is felt, Ven. Sariputta replied that the fact that nothing is felt is precisely what is blissful. It is a profound inner calm that transcends emotional highs and lows.

Release from the Burden of Self: The “bliss of release” is likened to the immense relief of removing a heavy burden or quitting an addiction.

Natural State of Mind: Nirvana is often interpreted as the mind’s natural state when unclouded by delusions and cravings.

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The amorality of enlightenment

Now, this explanation of the link between spiritual or existential enlightenment and positive mental states is more about monism in general than Buddhism. Apart from the emphasis on anatman, or the empiricist rejection of egoism, this explanation would apply to Advaita Vedanta, the monist tradition in Hinduism. Similarly, the early modern Western philosopher Baruch Spinoza said that contemplating the deterministic connections between everything in nature is blissful.

What’s undeniable is that any negative attitude that depends on egoism, the emotional attachment to the illusion of the self’s unity and priority, would have to vanish in the enlightened state of realizing there’s no such self. For instance, resentment towards nature’s treatment of living things would disappear because there would be no distinct living things to want to protect. All that would appear to exist within this enlightened state of nirvana would be the oneness of the cosmic whole.

The idea, then, is that when the cosmic whole reflects on itself, when the cosmos is “you-ing,” or superficially engaged in hosting your emergent properties of personhood, the cosmos feels those positive states of bemusement, bliss, tranquility, and so on. The universe, as it were, is relieved to have discovered it’s not a tormented, fragile self who worries about threats appearing around every corner. Instead, the universe realizes it’s a fearless, unconditioned, immortal totality.

Enlightenment is supposed to be merely the tuning of our mentality to this monistic reality, whereupon we adopt the whole’s default frequency, as it were, which is the serenity or contentment with whatever transpires.

Yet this answer still strikes me as dubiously anthropocentric. Hecht says a buddha has “nothing to do but be delighted with that surprising truth, and with the whole range of experience, without preference, without hurry, without dread.” Yet this implies that enlightenment is beyond good and evil in something like Friedrich Nietzsche’s sense.

A buddha leaves behind the negativity of egoistic fears and resentments, which are based on a confused attachment to superficial appearances. But for the same reason, a buddha must leave behind the positivity of moral concerns about suffering. Therefore, we must ask whether nirvana’s bliss, tranquility, relief, and so forth are genuine positive states.

Those of us who aren’t enlightened can only imagine the feeling of occupying this cosmic perspective. So if we imagine how the universe would feel about itself, we must surely imagine that this feeling would be inhuman. There would be no privileged link between the universe’s self-conception and the average, egoistic conception of anything. Whereas we’re concerned with overcoming suffering in life, because we’re beset with egoistic illusions, the universe has no reason to worry. The universe as a united whole is immortal.

Moreover, the universe isn’t preoccupied with any of its partial contents, which is to say that the whole doesn’t care about the superficial loss of its parts, including all the organisms that evolve in nature. None of those parts is ever really lost because none of them exists as a distinct thing in the first place. The parts are only minuscule fluctuations of the whole.

Thus, human suffering doesn’t matter from the cosmic perspective. Therefore, when contemplating something like the Nazi Holocaust or a spate of serial killings, a buddha should be exactly as bemused and tranquil as when this buddha is meditating on the delicate physics of a water droplet sliding off a curved leaf. All of these events would be amoral, from the enlightened vantage point, because morality is just as dependent on the flaws of egoism as dukkha, the burden of disappointment for the misled, harried self.

Buddhists and monists can’t have it both ways. If enlightenment undoes the suffering that’s caused by confused egoistic attachments, enlightenment must also negate the positive emotions that depend on egoistic triumphs. Morality is about what should happen, but morality is meaningful only from the egoistic context in which living things especially matter. There can be no such life-centered judgment from the cosmic vantage point. Thus, nothing is especially meaningful to the cosmos, as it were, since nothing else exists apart from that whole, and the whole isn’t free to obey prescriptions.

From the enlightened standpoint, there would be no sense in the moral idea that we need to rescue a drowning child. This would be because a buddha understands that the child doesn’t exist, and both the child’s suffering and that of the frantic onlookers is illusory. Only the whole is real, and both suffering and morality apply only to beings who are trapped and confused by egoism.

The horror of being a singularity

Assuming there’s no moral underpinning of the enlightened, cosmic mental state whatsoever, why exactly would the cosmos feel blissful? Indeed, isn’t bliss in conflict with the relief of tranquility or the inner calm of no longer being hounded by greed, anger, and delusion?

Bliss is perfect happiness, whereas calmness seems like a human approximation of what it must be like to be a mindless object that has no emotional capacities. Although neither would strictly apply, it would make more sense to attribute calmness to a rock than bliss. This is because calmness or tranquility is the negative state of being free from mental agitations or disturbances, and indeed, a rock (or the cosmic totality) would be free in that sense. But that negative state isn’t the same as being positively happy, joyful, or blissful.

A buddha might have reason to be calm and tranquil since this enlightened person would be content with any local fluctuation of the cosmic whole, including what deluded egotists like you and me would consider disastrous ones, such as the sixth mass extinction of terrestrial life. The Buddha would side with the cosmos in realizing that if all life were to die out on Earth, that would be of no special consequence because life would evolve countless other times throughout the universe, and in any case, nonlife is exactly as important as life since neither would matter at all compared to the underlying oneness.

But why would a buddha feel joy or bliss? Sure, there might be relief from being free of the delusions of egoism, but why would that be a lasting reaction to enlightenment? Or why would this relief be a default mental state? After all, that would imply that enlightenment depends on the delusions of egoism. Again, the enlightened state should have nothing to do with the fears and joys of misled self-centeredness.

Unenlightened individuals feel joy because they’re temporarily relieved from some worry or because they’ve managed to succeed in some venture. The joys are as fleeting as the worries because circumstances change for those who don’t occupy the cosmic vantage point. Yet for the buddha who does occupy it, what exactly could be the source of continual joy? Put differently, why would the cosmos feel joy when contemplating its immortality?

Here, a different metaphor suggests itself since the cosmic oneness would be like the absolute monarch who is liable to be corrupt enough to entertain a solipsistic dismissal of all seemingly lower beings, such as the courtiers and peasants in the kingdom or dictatorship. We easily imagine a king or dictator succumbing to arrogance in contemplating his dominance or what the society would consider his sole, overarching importance. Similarly, the cosmos would disregard the local values of its parts, focusing instead on the greatness of its unity.

But if we imagine that the sovereign lives long enough to learn the folly of this corruption and self-regard, we must assume that the sovereign might become revolted by the society’s worship of this ruler. The horror of being a society’s lynchpin might dawn on him, so that the pinnacle would feel dread rather than joy.

Indeed, it’s misleading to say that the monist advocates the surrender of egoism since all that happens in enlightenment is that the cosmic whole’s virtual self-regard replaces the local part’s self-regard. The cosmos would have nothing else to occupy its attention, as it were, but itself, which is to speak of the real totality of all the universe’s unified elements, forces, levels, systems, and cycles. And the enlightened monist merely adopts that cosmic perspective, feeling what the cosmos would feel about itself if the cosmos had such a cognitive capacity.

So, given the above view, the Buddhist’s conceptions aren’t altruistic since this monist must think there’s nothing apart from the cosmic whole. Only one thing exists, according to monism, so there can be no enlightened thought about something else, as in something other than the whole. Anyone who identifies with the cosmic whole can reflect only on that underlying unity, which is the same as reflecting on the enlightened person’s real identity. Selflessness is as impossible for buddhas as morality or selfishness, and for the same reason.

Why not assume, then, that the cosmos would feel horror rather than joy? Why wouldn’t the most fitting emotional reaction to being the cosmos be horror or disgust rather than joy or peace? Sure, the cosmos would be free from the disturbances of egoistic confusions, but not from solipsistic reflections on the grotesque absurdity of being the only thing that’s real!

This discovery would be like the king’s realization that life doesn’t matter in his kingdom since he can send anyone to the executioner with a mere whimsical wave of his hand. Only the absolute monarch matters in this one-sided society, and the king realizes that since he’s the arbiter of the law, he’s beyond good and evil. There’s no higher authority than this decadent solipsist, just as there can be no higher evaluation of the cosmic whole since nothing else would exist upon which to establish an independent judgment.

An evaluation requires two things: the evaluator and the evaluated. If there’s only one thing, this thing could evaluate itself, but that would be as worthless as a corporation that agrees to regulate its pollution without governmental monitoring or penalties.

The upshot is that this kind of uplifting monism should be critiqued. It’s worthwhile imagining the contents of a cosmic perspective, and it’s plausible to speak of relief from the end of egoism. Indeed, we all might feel some such relief in our moments of dying, when we realize we needn’t worry any more about our parochial problems.

But crediting the cosmic perspective with joy or happiness is facile. For an enlightened, cosmically-oriented “individual,” those are morally positive states that should be as unsustainable as the negative ones of egoistic fears and hatreds.

Insofar as Buddhism features the Four Noble Truths, this religious philosophy is pragmatic.

These four truths are:

• (1) that life in samsara is characterized by dukkha, by suffering one disappointment after another

• (2) that this suffering is caused by a mental deficiency, namely craving or emotional attachment to things

• (3) that this suffering can end by correcting that deficiency and renouncing what was craved

• (4) that the Noble Eightfold Path is a plan for correcting that inner deficiency.

Notice that there’s no normative force to any of these essential Buddhist teachings. Even the eightfold path, which speaks of “right speech,” “right conduct,” “right effort,” and so forth, assumes only instrumental rightness. The rightness of the prescribed ways of acting consists only of their effectiveness in achieving the goal set out by the Four Noble Truths, specifically the fourth one.

Certain ways of acting are optimal in retraining the mind and ending suffering in the Buddhist manner. But this is a far cry from declaring that God commands that we be Buddhists or that the universe is designed such that we’re all destined to end our suffering with enlightenment. The essence of Buddhism is strictly an observation of a certain hidden causal pattern. Whereas most people suffer for certain fundamental reasons, there’s another way to go as a matter of sheer causality. Speaking of causality isn’t the same as issuing an imperative or declaring that we ought to prefer one of the two paths.

This therapeutic pragmatism is consistent with Buddhism’s deconstruction of metaphysics and theology, and with the Buddhist explanation that the self is empty, as is every other form that appears in the sensible world. Instead, in this realm of appearances or sense experiences, everything arises as being dependent on something else, so the identity of this tree, that stone, or this person is smeared out in the causal fabric.

That’s why it’s wrongheaded to cling to anything as though that thing could save you like a supernatural superhero who stands outside the causal chains, or like an immovable stone that resists the tide. The stone is connected to the water as part of a larger, cosmic tide, as is the superhero to the supervillain and the ordinary bystanders, as it were. Salvation from suffering is found only when we stop fixating on things, stop mistaking shadows for substances, and start treating our experience as a field of illusions. That way we won’t be disappointed when we don’t get what we want, because we won’t be so inflexible in our desires. We’ll learn to flow in our mental states in the way that lifeless things in the world flow as parts of the causal field.

Pragmatic or cosmic Buddhism?

Notice, second, how similar this is to Stoicism. For the Stoics, too, we should realize there’s much we can’t change, even while there are some things we can. The outer world is largely lost to us because it’s being impacted from countless directions, as part of that field of causality. But internally, we have some autonomous control over how we feel about what happens to us. As in Buddhism, the Stoic trains his or her mind to have the right expectations, to not presume that we should expect much in life, given our meager control over the course of events. There’s a luck factor in how events unfold that humbles the wise person.

However, there’s a crucial difference between Buddhism and Stoicism, which is that the latter is beholden to the rationalist tradition of Greek philosophy. Stoics thus supply an additional reason why the sage should assent to whatever happens in the outer world, which is that the causal order is itself rational. Everything is supposed to happen for a greater good. The Stoic philosopher Epictetus, for example, was a determinist who thought the universe was organized as a grand harmony. This brings Stoicism closer to Daoism than Buddhism.

(In The Shape of Ancient Thought, Thomas McEvilley compares the goal of the Four Noble Truths to the general one in Greek philosophy of achieving ataraxia or being detached, dispassionate, and content with whatever happens. Wisdom in ancient Greece and India was a kind of settling down to avoid extremes out of deference to something greater than us.)

Technically, the Four Noble Truths are neutral about any such metaphysical basis of Buddhism. The enlightened Buddhist isn’t on the side of the cosmos whereas sufferers languish in the world of sensory and cognitive illusions. All the essence of Buddhism provides is that the enlightened person is free of the type of suffering that’s caused by a common mental deficiency.

More precisely, this suffering is caused by the mind’s natural functioning. The “deficiency” of craving or attachment is normal for creatures insofar as we’re being played by evolution, our genes, and our animalistic impulses. We’re drawn into natural processes that make fools of us, that narrow our attention and blind us to the big picture. Enlightenment is the awakening from this automated mode of life, which occurs when we recognize the cosmic aspect of events, in which case we take events to be mere nodes in a causal field, waves in the universal ocean, or shadows cast on the cave wall (to borrow Plato’s metaphor).

Cosmically, everything we encounter is empty of substance and dependent rather than independent. Likewise, from that perspective, there’s not even a unified, freestanding self. All we can detect through introspection are fleeting mental states, just like the situations we encounter in the outer world that come and go. Thus, we shouldn’t be attached to the illusion of an immortal, immaterial self.

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Amoral Buddhism

As an explanation of the foolishness of the selfish behaviour that generates endless rounds of suffering (especially disappointments), Buddhism is exemplary, and its logic is impeccable. However, the austerity of this reasoning leads to the problem that pure pragmatism is amoral.

Let’s take this step by step to avoid confusion. As outlined above, Buddhism undermines egoism. The Buddhist identifies an enlightened way of looking at both outer and inner experience, which makes egoistic grasping seem wrongheaded. And the Buddhist provides a program that will suffice, instrumentally speaking, to end the suffering that’s caused by that common wrongheadedness.

But now the Buddhist faces a question: Is she content with the amorality of her cosmic perspective? If so, she can afford only a pragmatic answer to the question of whether we should all be Buddhists. That is, she could say only that Buddhism offers such and such benefits: we can choose the Buddhist path or the path of egoistic craving and suffering, and there’s no philosophical, theological, or any other higher imperative to dictate our choice between them.

The amoral Buddhist could only hold out the two paths as separate causal chains with different endpoints. Those causes and effects would have no inherent value, according to the Buddhist’s cosmic perspective on the dependent arising of all events in sense experience.

Let’s frame the question more forcefully: Is Buddhist tranquility better than egoistic suffering? Is it better to be enlightened than unenlightened? Better to end our cravings and disappointments or to be absorbed in the field of illusions?

As far as I can tell, the essence of original Buddhism is silent even on these questions of fundamental value. There’s only the pragmatic understanding of different causal paths. The Buddha’s goal was to provide a therapy, a guaranteed cure, but whether the cure is better than the disease is up to each patient to decide.

As it happens, of course, people do want to end their suffering — for unenlightened reasons. We prefer pleasure or peace to pain, because we’re attached to ourselves and our animal instincts and social conditioning, which train us to prefer one to the other. We think we’re great in our starring roles, so we infer that we deserve to be happy. That’s why we would rush to Buddhism for its cure. Yet the Buddhist cure throws the baby out with the bathwater. Suffering ends only when we recognize that we’re not so great after all, that we don’t deserve happiness because we’re only a drop in the cosmic bucket. And that’s why many folks flee from Buddhism.

Nihilistic Buddhism

Does it even make sense to speak of Buddhist morality, from the cosmic perspective in which all forms are empty of independent content? The inner self isn’t so real that we should be attached to it as a heroic refuge from the storm of causality. “Everything flows, so get used to disappointment!” That’s the upshot of Buddhism and Stoicism too.

If we’re as illusory as the appearances that flash before our senses and that we concretize by giving them the stamp of our cognitive approval, why not treat all our values as being as arbitrary as those concepts that mislead us into thinking of appearances as independent substances? Ironically, we mislead ourselves in our very attempt to understand phenomena. We filter the barrage of contents with our preconceptions and reifications.

Thus, we shouldn’t be disappointed when we don’t win the lottery because the lottery is just one drop in the cosmic bucket, like every other event that transpires in the field of human experience. We shouldn’t grow attached to the thought of winning that lottery because playing the lottery is a fool’s errand. Becoming emotionally invested in the lottery would amount to attaching ourselves only to a phantasm or a reification produced by our cognitive filters. In its dependence on countless other events, the real event of the lottery is hollow, which is to say inhuman. Caring about something that can’t care back is mentally disordered.

We understand natural events by humanizing them, but in themselves they’re alien and nothing as fortunate as a steppingstone made for our benefit. Unless the lottery is rigged, it’s a random event that isn’t concerned about pleasing or disappointing anyone. It just happens. More precisely, there is no lottery, not any unified entity that matches the tidiness of our concept of lotteries. Instead, there’s a field of causally ordered micro and macro events that are local nodes in a field of appearances that we simplify (humanize) with language, concepts, memories, stories, and feelings. There are networks of ignored events that add up to a so-called lottery that occurs at some time and place, but really there’s no time, no place, and no lottery. In reality, there’s only the total, unknowable causal field of samsara.

Neither is there you or me: there’s no lottery, and there’s no one to care about that oversimplified event. There is no real, independent container of our mental states. We have bodies, but those bodies are beholden to the environment in myriad perceived and unperceived ways. We’re not as autonomous or substantial as we like to think. Therefore, we can’t be so straightforwardly valuable.

Buddhism runs up against nihilism in this fashion. There are Buddhist answers to this problem, of course, such as the distinction between conventional and real truth. The world of appearances might be called conventionally real but unreal in a deeper sense. But this is a word game that fulfills the social function that Leo Strauss identified. To avoid offending the unenlightened herd, Buddhists may conceal the implications of their key arguments, but the implications follow as a matter of logic. You can speak of “conventional reality,” but that’s a fig leaf worn over mass confusion.

Natural creativity and secular values

A better response to the threat of Buddhist nihilism via its pragmatism and cosmic perspective is the one I present elsewhere, which is just modern naturalistic philosophy. The world of appearances is real, not just reified, because we’re not the only things that busy themselves with constructive projects of simplifying the totality of natural events. Nature is also immensely productive. Thus, nature builds its forms with complexified, evolved, and emerging phases and levels of natural order.

For example, planets are real even though they’re not the whole of reality. They’re not just figments of our imagination. And to understand how planets form is to understand the depth of their reality. It’s the same with selves or minds: we evolve by natural selection, and we develop further by social conditioning. We thus depend on various conditions, so our reality is limited as Buddhists say, but our independence and autonomy aren’t therefore illusory. Our identity may correspond to conceptual simplifications, but those concepts aren’t pure fictions. We constrain our realistic concepts with rational inferences, which enable us to understand how natural forms arise.

Whether we’re sufficiently independent and substantial to warrant our egoistic adventures is another matter. Is it wiser to credit limited things with limited value or to give up on all evaluations because everything fades to nothing in the end? Should we renounce all human pastimes because our cognitive efforts are biased and flawed? Or should we appreciate how human knowledge has progressed to the point of empowering us with modern science and technology, which in turn are no mere illusions but outgrowths of nature’s evident creativity?

Still, reconstructing morality in naturalistic, secular terms isn’t straightforward. We may be biologically, psychologically, and socially real creatures, but we’re just creatures and indeed only drops in the cosmic bucket in existential terms. The Buddhist may prefer to ignore the question of absolute value, to focus on the pragmatic imperative of ending suffering. But Buddhism and naturalistic philosophy more generally face the threat of nihilism.

• “But I will show him what a man can do and what a man endures.”
  ― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

• “We fight it down, and we live it down, or we bear it bravely well,
  But the best men die of a broken heart for the things they cannot tell.”
  ― Henry Lawson, When I Was King and Other Verses

Like femininity, manliness or masculinity is a shifting cultural ideal, a model of strength, virility, and mastery for men.

Action-movie heroes like those played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, and Jason Statham embody some young men’s conception of how men should behave. By contrast, the leading men in romantic comedies and romance novels show how women wish men would act.

Is the concept of manliness even coherent, however, or have there been so many cultural shifts over history that trying to be manly anymore is a fool’s errand? Is this an outdated ideal, not just because First World standards of political correctness are more humanistic, but because civilized men face a paradox that makes them obsolete?

Manliness is supposed to be a kind of heroism that’s more suitable for men than women. But the problem is that our impression of masculine heroism is largely shaped by both our local culture and our evolutionary past. The long Paleolithic Era established much of what feels intuitively right to us as a species. Yet the prehistoric lifestyle that prevailed for some two million years must have differed greatly from the kind that emerged in sedentary societies.

Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything pointed out that the scant evidence we have for how prehistoric people lived indicates an experimental variety of lifestyles, including perhaps some seasonally dependent sedentary gatherings.

However much earlier anthropologists might have oversimplified or projected their prejudices in their attempts to explain the evidence of prehistoric societies, there was still likely a gradual transition from nonhuman primates to early humans. And nonhuman primates form small nomadic bands that adapt to environmental opportunities and dangers by roaming freely and thus living in the wild. In short, early humans were relatively dependent on the natural environment, which is to say they were more like wild animals than people.

What distinguishes animals is their body type, and that’s determined by natural selection: animals adapt to what nature provides, finding a niche in which they can excel, or they fail to do so, and their genes are less likely to be passed on to help shape the next generation’s body type.

People, however, evolve culturally rather than just biologically, and what shapes our cultures is the artificial environment we build precisely to separate us from nature. People adapt to artificial environments, which is to say we guide ourselves, confined as we are to our civilizational echo chambers that reinforce artificial norms that have no place in the wild.

As evolutionary psychologists are quick to point out, the traits that enable animals to flourish are far from those that would be welcome in a civilized setting. Nevertheless, animal heroism likely influenced our intuitions about masculinity because our prehistoric ancestors lived for such a formative period mainly in the wilderness, subject to nature’s evolutionary parameters.

This is why sports teams often hold up animals as their mascots. Tigers, bulls, panthers, grizzlies, eagles, falcons, hawks, and many more help define masculinity because living in the wild calls for great bravery, strength, speed, and cunning, which are virtues that separate winners from losers in sports competitions.

Thus, we expect a manly man to be able to fend for himself, to survive in the wild like an animal with only his inherent skills at his disposal. To that extent, manliness is anti-cultural since it belongs to our formative condition in the Stone Age.

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Prehistoric people fashioned stone tools to augment their bodies, so not even they were perfectly manly in this sense. For that matter, even animals have no inherent skills since their genes equip them, as it were, with body parts such as claws, armour, or wings. Still, the purest case of independent, authentic heroism would be an animal that flourishes in the wild, with no help from anything outside its body or naturally selected social unit, such as its hunting pack.

Action movies exemplify this admiration of animals by depicting the collapse of the civilized order that forces the hero to “take matters into his hands,” even bending the law to “get stuff done.” Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry character popularized this trope, as did Batman, the famous comic book vigilante. Sarah Connor from Terminator 2 might be deemed manly for excelling under the same post-apocalyptic or failed-state conditions, although in her case, she only anticipates the inevitable nuclear war that will wipe out civilization and pit the human remnants against an AI-governed wasteland.

Now, the problem with this pro-animal conception of masculinity is that it’s supposed to appeal to civilized men. How can the average male in a developed society who’s dependent on a thousand luxuries possibly admire a barbaric, savage man without that prehistoric conception of manliness being a sheer fantasy for him? A domesticated man might fantasize about the possible world in which society vanishes, and men must revert to animal norms, but that wouldn’t mean this man should act on that fantasy. On the contrary, those who try to be manly in this sense would end up committing crimes and being sent to prison.

The average domesticated male doesn’t admire prison inmates even though they’re the ones who flout the law, so they “take matters into their hands” and “get stuff done,” like Dirty Harry. It’s just that they happen to get caught and punished because the civilized social order is in place. Still, prison life approximates in some ways life in the wild, in that both are free from civilized luxuries.

Domesticated males don’t admire criminals because criminals aren’t honourable. Honour is a mushy value that accommodates the shift in setting from the wild to a sedentary society. Think, for instance, of honour in warfare. The most honourable soldiers are those like the samurai who have minimal assistance from an infantilizing bureaucracy or an armoury of automatic weapons. They used swords rather than guns because killing with a sword takes greater discipline and courage. If the concept of honour is stretched to include some soldiers who deploy guns, a line may still be drawn between, say, the intrepid US Marine and the drone pilot who kills from a remote air-conditioned basement.

Similarly, we might compare manliness in the lower and upper economic classes. The lower-class lifestyle resembles that of the prison inmate, in that both are left to their wits. Vagrants may even be as nomadic as the prehistoric man who had the chance for animal glory and thus manliness in the Stone Age sense.

Yet again, few men admire whatever masculinity is found in lower-class males. Capitalist ideologies would help shape the sense of honour at work here. Those who are financially poor may be deemed unmanly in some more recent sense because they lack the virtues of self-determination, ambition, and ruthlessness that are supposed to propel someone to fame and riches in a capitalist economy. Here, the laissez-faire setting is assumed to approximate the natural struggle for survival, so that the sense of honour at issue would be socially Darwinian.

According to this modern sense of honour that updates our conception of manliness, we might think billionaires are more manly than working-class men. Clearly, billionaires are better capitalists than those who can’t afford their rent.

Yet we also likely suspect that billionaires such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson overcompensate in their demonstrations of manliness because they’re not manly in the more foundational sense that honours animality rather than personhood. Billionaires must be more pampered than working-class men, so the billionaire lifestyle is infantilizing, and that’s not conducive to honour. The more crutches someone relies on, such as a host of mansions, bank accounts, machines, or sycophantic underlings, the less this aristocratic individual can demonstrate inherent heroism.

Or consider collective manliness across countries. The comedian Bill Maher became infamous shortly after 9/11 for pointing out that it took bravery for the militant jihadists to carry out their terrorist attacks. He lost his show Politically Incorrect because he implied that the terrorists were at least as manly as US soldiers.

Here again, we have the split between conceptions. According to the primitive standard that would have us expect men to excel as animals in the wild, poorer countries must be more manly than richer ones because the latter are spoiled by their high technology and other luxuries. Yet that old sense of manliness doesn’t appeal to civilized folks, so it must be updated. Hence, the standard is stretched with the notion of honour that prizes some virtuous use of civilized advantages.

Even though American soldiers depend on their wealthy country for their resources, so that they rarely display an animal’s style of heroism, we may credit these soldiers for enforcing America’s superpower. These soldiers would be avatars of American supremacy, so they inherit the virtues that the US as a whole is thought to demonstrate through much of its history. By contrast, the Islamist terrorists demonstrate the vices that have held back the Muslim world for at least a century.

Plainly, there’s a tension between the heroism we’d expect an animal to display in the wild, and the kind a person could perform in a civilized setting. The wilderness dictates what counts as heroism (as in adaptability or evolutionary fitness) for wild animals, while our artificial environments shape our more muddled image of heroism that’s supposed to apply to domesticated people. Yet people evolved from animals, so we have both conceptions of men’s heroism in mind. Those conceptions pull us in different directions, leaving us with a confused, incoherent standard of manliness.

We could demonstrate this by asking whether various prominent men are manly, and noting how the different standards supply us with different answers.

For instance, Joe Rogan is manly according to the Stone Age standard. He’s athletic, a martial arts expert, a hunter, and an independent thinker who’s no functionary of the State or groupthink. We suspect that Rogan might be able to survive in a post-apocalyptic aftermath. Rogan is also manly in the social Darwinian sense since he’s rich and famous, so he excels according to capitalistic standards.

Yet once we emphasize that second, updated sense of manliness, we’re poised to rethink the merit of our first estimation. Doesn’t the primitive mentality or behaviour that makes for an animal’s wild strengths count against the late-modern honour found in domesticated manliness? Isn’t that why Rogan must backtrack for his support for Donald Trump’s political vandalism? The savagery involved in trolling America by supporting an obviously anti-American, authoritarian president who means to undo America’s greatness can have nothing to do with what made America great in the first place.

Likewise, isn’t Rogan’s mushy-headed reliance on cannabis all too compatible with his wealth, which provides him with a cushy lifestyle? Both enable Rogan to occupy a fantasy world, detached from reality. No wild animal could afford to be a happy-go-lucky dreamer, yet Rogan’s wealth and fame insulate him from the consequences of his departure from critical thinking and his cynicism about authorities.

So, is Joe Rogan manly? There’s no coherent answer because the standards contradict each other. These standards are fit for very different environments, but they’re both still operative because our evolved intuitions and prejudices guide our bodies while our cultural compromises shape our minds.

According to the humanist conception that ought to prevail for those who view themselves as people rather than tribal animals, manliness is likely an archaic notion. The more advanced our technology, the more our sense of manliness will have to stretch to the breaking point, until those who will excel in the late twenty-first century’s high-tech environments will be the opposite of manly.

Of course, if that optimistic scenario doesn’t arise, and we’ll instead face an apocalyptic reversion to savagery, due to global warming or some other mode of self-destruction, we’ll likely revert to the prehistoric standard of manly virtue, in which case “manly” will be a euphemism for animal savagery.

My fourth album, “Celestial Trips,” is out now on YouTube.

As with the others, I wrote all the lyrics, and Suno.ai set them to music based on my tastes. Some topics covered in this album, besides the usual (religion, politics, and cosmic matters), are war, masculinity, and wokeness.

One highlight for me is the last song, “Twin Trips,” which I wrote for my second novel, God’s Fugitives. But my personal favourite song on this album is “The Source,” both for its lyrics and melody.

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My fifth album, “Doldrums,” is nearly finished, too, and it’s different in that all its songs are in the same genre, slowcore, so it’s something of a concept album. Its songs feature simulated organs, trumpets, saxophones, and harmonicas.

I also plan to put together videos for my favourite songs from these albums, so stay tuned for them.

Celestial Trips:

Strata:

Vagaries of Deep Time:

Algos in the Cave:

With the rise of agriculture around 12,000 years ago, civilizations have been largely patriarchal. Men have tended to rule over women, and that power arrangement reinforced rationales for the differences between men and women.

Men and women were supposed to be masculine and feminine, respectively, and religion, art, and philosophy fleshed out those assumptions to train civilized boys and girls.

Ironically, though, while masculinity is generally a value system for dominators, and femininity is a program of submissiveness for the dominated, nature had other ideas.

Masculinity as men’s comeback from natural disgrace

In the Stone Age, nomadic bands of early humans were likely egalitarian out of necessity because there were few resources for imposing the will of an elite class, and early humans had the intelligence to cooperate and gang up against would-be dominators. The resources to sustain social inequalities would have to await the rise of sedentary societies and specialized classes that formed around agriculture. That new lifestyle of farming the land and domesticating animals trained people to expect and to approve of human dominators.

Still, early men and women weren’t biologically equal in that the two main genders had different reproductive roles, as is apparent from the colossal difference in body types. Women carry infants to term, birth them, and feed them with breastmilk. Men don’t.

Anthropologists in the 1970s proposed the Expendable Male Hypothesis to explain polygyny and hunter-gatherer men’s prominence in hunting. We think of a harem as being a sign of extravagant male power, but the opposite is true, according to this hypothesis. The male’s role in reproduction is much less labour-intensive than the female’s, so that a human population can grow with many women and few men, but not in the opposite scenario. Women matter more than men to sustaining or growing a population because few men can impregnate many women, as in polygyny.

This isn’t to say that men were useless in prehistory. Obviously, men supply a necessary genetic component to offspring. But that’s a fact about men in general, not individual men. Some men are necessary for growing a human population, but that doesn’t mean every man is necessary. By contrast, every woman’s womb and eggs are precious in a way that isn’t true for every man’s reproductive organs. Both maleness and femaleness are required for sexual reproduction, but individual women matter more than individual men in sustaining the population in evolutionary terms. When a womb is occupied for nine months, you need another womb to grow the population, yet a single man’s semen replenishes much more quickly.

What’s interesting about this hypothesis is that the Western cultural standard of masculinity might have arisen as a backlash to the natural fact of men’s expendability. If men had to live with knowing that they were more individually expendable than the women in their group, so that men went on dangerous hunts while women undertook the more important risk of giving birth, men must eventually have searched for a cultural compensation for that lower implicit status.

Western cultures conceive of masculinity as a set of virtues, such as strength, courage, independence, leadership, dominance, and assertiveness. There’s a grimness to this outlook, which would testify to men’s initial lowliness. Male strength is a matter of rising from the ashes or rectifying a bad situation. Male virtues are often martial, which is to say that men found themselves in combat, whether with other men, wild animals, or natural forces. This is because men were more expendable, and women were preoccupied with the more crucial task of propagating our species.

Leadership, for example, is a masculine virtue, but why would leaders have been needed in prehistory? Hunter-gatherer bands were relatively egalitarian, as I said, so why would men have eventually striven to lead? Perhaps it was to prove their worth, as an overcompensation for nature’s lowly estimation of men, as it were. Think of the grandstanding politician who makes a fuss about some minor issue to ingratiate himself with his constituents. That kind of pitiful performance might have been the origin of male leadership and thus the Western conception of masculinity.

Or why do masculine men strive to dominate others? Again, such behaviour would have been misplaced in prehistory because early humans were an endangered species, and small nomadic groups of hunter-gatherers couldn’t have afforded to waste their members on social games of exclusion. Only members who threatened the group would have been ostracized or killed. So why would masculine domination eventually be glorified as exemplary conduct for men?

Again, it would have been a matter of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, spitting in nature’s face, and taking the reins in a Promethean revolt against what would have seemed the unfairness of the evolutionary process.

Masculine men dominate women, other men, the wilderness, or any problem that arises because men have more to prove than women. Men must prove themselves because their Maker (nature) judged them inferior, as it were. Women have nothing to prove because their inherent worth is obvious: they give birth to new life and nurture the precious offspring with milk from their bodies (which was all that prehistoric babies could have eaten in their earliest months).

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Women’s fall into the prison of femininity

There’s a second irony in the advent of femininity. Women’s greater indispensability led to early goddess cultures, which indicated that early humans celebrated women’s seemingly miraculous power to carry life to term.

But there’s a downside to being put on a pedestal and worshipped. We see this in celebrities who bristle at how their privileges infantilize them. Surrounded by sycophants and luxuries, celebrities paradoxically may seem subhuman. They’re overprotected because they’re deemed precious, so they lose the ability to care for themselves. Addicted to adulation, they become mascots for a corporation or industry.

Bill Murray, for instance, likes to surprise fans by showing up randomly at strangers’ weddings and other events. Why? Because he doesn’t want to be locked up in the prison of fame, and he craves ordinary human socializing, even if he can’t help but make a spectacle of himself wherever he goes.

Virginia Woolf said in A Writer’s Diary, ‘I will not be “famous,” “great.” I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one’s self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded.’

Ironically, nature’s higher estimation of individual prehistoric women may have impeded them once humans began toying with cultural symbols to make sense of their condition. By hunting because of their expendability, men were the ones who could say they adventured. Men travelled far from the tribe, following wild animals, and risking death to bring back meat. Women were too precious to risk their wombs on optional adventures.

Thus, women’s very biologically ingrained indispensability made for an opposite dynamic. Masculinity arose as an overcompensation for most men’s lesser importance to most women. Nature deemed men inferior, so behaviourally modern, culturally active men rose to the challenge and assigned themselves superior worth with a host of ideologies. By contrast, nature deemed women superior, and that superiority caged women so that femininity arose as a debilitating culture.

Men challenged their lowly status in the prehistoric wilderness, while women fell into cultural prisons from their greater height in a strictly evolutionary assessment of their worth.

The upshot is that there’s a comical dimension to such cultural rationales. We obsess over shifting standards of political correctness and obey social conventions as though they were worthy of respect. We need some such fictions to cooperate with large numbers of strangers, as Yuval Harari pointed out in Sapiens. But the ironies that underlie the myths of masculinity and femininity show that we’re flailing in nature’s grasp.

What has the advent of civilization done to manliness? Does social progress domesticate and infantilize us? Who now are the manliest men? And is manliness a good thing in the first place?

We can compare the average male lifestyles in three stages of human development:

• the long prehistoric age of the hunter-gatherer

• the current age of civilizational strife and progressive technological empowerment

• the hints of an inchoate posthuman age.

What’s curious about this outline is that the first and third stages — what we can think of, respectively, as the input and the output of civilization — have comparable effects on manhood, leaving men’s role in civilization as a possible outlier.

Affluence, vagrancy, and Stone Age animality

Consider, first, that the nomadic Stone Age hunter-gatherer likely lived in what anthropologists call the “original affluent society.” Hunter-gatherers had more leisure time than sedentary farmers because the nomads didn’t have to labour to store food and other resources for long-term future use. One study from 2019 indicates that “Hunter-gatherers in the Philippines who adopt farming work around ten hours a week longer than their forager neighbors.”

This isn’t to say that the Stone Age was a paradise. Living in the wilderness as practically just another animal species would have presented many threats to early humans. But during what was probably their shorter lifespan, even the average hunter-gatherers lived like kings, relative to their aspirations, in that they were as independent and free as only the civilized upper class would become.

Of course, Stone Age people lacked the advanced resources to luxuriate in their affluence, such as with fine cuisine, designer clothing, and private jets. Nevertheless, it’s a curious fact that the Stone Age male would have been so free that he’d have had little work to do. Low-hanging food was abundant, there were few humans to compete with, and human intelligence enabled the hunters to outwit megafauna, at least some species of which are now extinct for that reason.

This raises the question of the relevance of work itself to male identity. Two kinds of nonworkers are familiar from our civilized period:

• the aristocrat who lives off an inheritance or on the interest accruing from a fortune and can retire early

• the impoverished peasant who depends on charity and government support.

Neither individual is especially manly, despite the hype for the ultra-wealthy lifestyle. Billionaires like Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk carry themselves as intrepid adventurers, but this image in the press seems more like overcompensation for the obvious fact that when you have so much money, nothing you do any longer carries the slightest risk. Even if the wealthy wanted to give away all their money, they’d have a hard time doing so because capitalistic economies are typically rigged in their favour.

We admire the wealthy who earn their money, and we pity the poor and the disadvantaged. But again, arguably both the wealthy and the dregs of society are equally unmanly, according to the Western stereotype of manliness. The reasons differ, but the assessments are similar.

The wealthy are decadent, pampered, surrounded by sycophants, and infantilized. Wealthy males are more like carefree boys than like men because they can do no wrong. Even when they err, they can afford to try again and again ten thousand times until they get what they want. They treat their many possessions like disposable toys because they can always buy new and better ones. The wealthy act practically with impunity, just like children who aren’t tried in court as adults and who thus can’t commit crimes even when their behaviour is catastrophic.

As for the have-nots, they too are like children in their dependence on others and their inability to fend for themselves. In civilized societies, we look out for our interests mainly by working for a living, so the jobless resemble children who indulge in that twilight state of being able to play throughout the day before they’re forced to turn to their adult labours. Mind you, the homeless and the penniless can’t afford to play either, but they still resemble both children and the ultra-wealthy in that they lack manly virtues because their identity isn’t defined by their job title.

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How work defines our gendered identity

In any case, my point here is that both of those opposite individuals from the civilized age also resemble the Stone Age nomads who likewise defined themselves more by their leisure than their role as foragers. Indeed, we label them “hunter-gatherers” only because we think work is crucial to anyone’s identity as a human, just as we think of ourselves primarily as doctors, lawyers, carpenters, bus drivers, farmers, and so forth, depending on our occupation.

What we see here, though, is that the unoccupied person is paradoxically both the affluent and the vagrant, the “immature,” childlike adult and the proto-human mammal. The childlike aspect of all three of these categories, of the Stone Age nomad, the billionaire, and the penniless vagabond, might better be thought of as a state of incipient animality, which would mean that the alternative state of being a civilized, hard-working person whose identity derives from his or her job is the essence of what we think of as maturity for men.

(Note that most civilized societies have been patriarchal, so women were usually relegated to an equally childlike status, as lesser members of society and even as private property, equivalent to slaves or livestock, their job being to breed and please their male captors.)

What, then, is a manly man, according to civilized standards? Notice the fine line between the man who happens to be emasculated by his occupation, and the antihero who lives on the edge of the law and thus is liable to become the above kind of man-child whose freedom from the responsibilities of work we deem to be unmanly.

We see the first dynamic play out, for example, in the animated movie The Incredibles, in which the superheroic protagonist Bob tires of his tedious family life and his boring job as an insurance adjuster. He secretly returns to his life as a superhero, drawing his family into danger. In effect, Bob rejects the civilized ideal, which is to restrain your urges and full potential, to compromise and sacrifice yourself in mundane, degrading ways for the collective good.

Clint Eastwood’s Western antihero and Dirty Harry characters take this social critique further since, as with Batman in Gotham, the gunslinger for hire operates on the lawless frontier as a pioneer or vigilante in a failed, crime-ridden city that gives the lie to civilized progress. The gunslinger struggles in a grey area like the Stone Age nomad, having to choose between good and evil even when morality hasn’t been codified. The gunslinger is more like a parasite or a predator than a manly upholder of some civilization-friendly ideal.

Perhaps the ultimate male role model in civil society is someone like Joe Rogan, a self-made man, a martial artist who can take care of himself, a comedian who — like the antihero — doesn’t take life too seriously, and an independent thinker who carves his path in life, eschewing cultish fads like Trumpism and Wokeness (until he succumbed in that latter respect). Rogan’s liberal cannabis use makes him boyish and anti-authoritarian enough to avoid the trap of losing his freedom in servitude to his superiors on the job. He works several jobs, though, as a UFC announcer, comedian, and podcaster, and he’s wealthy enough to be affluent but not enough to be infantilized by his success.

Posthuman outcasts

Let’s stop and notice how civilization changed the nature of manhood by domesticating most men as slaves, farmers, soldiers, elite priests, or middle managers. City states, kingdoms, and empires had to be propped up by an abundance of labour, and for thousands of years there were few machines to carry out the tasks. Livestock and men had to perform them.

The automation of labour, however, threatens to replace those human labourers with machines. Advances in artificial intelligence may do the same for the elite, white-collar occupations. Here, then, is the source of those populist revolts against so-called civilized progress. These revolts are practically just men’s rights movements. On the surface, the struggle of unions, Islamist terrorists, or right-wing populist or fascist movements is typically to secure higher wages or to terminate the machines, immigration laws, or scapegoats that are supposed to be taking the local jobs. But the more serious threat from this industrial, neoliberal “progress” that doesn’t benefit most men is that it leaves their manhood in the lurch.

Under the patriarchal norm, women’s identity had long been in limbo. After all, what’s the nature of the ideal woman? Is it to be a nurturing, beautiful slave for men, or is that obviously just the man’s self-serving preference? And is there a distinct female identity when women have equal chances as men to labour in the economy, to define their identity by their mode of work? If not, and if opposites attract, what becomes of heterosexual mating if women are becoming more manly and men are being feminized and emasculated by machines?

Leaving that aside for now, the point is that machines are doing to men what men have long done to women: pushing them out of a job-defined identity. Think of the hundreds of millions of men and women whose jobs can be filled more profitably by machines in the coming decades. Far from being manly, self-made men, these masses who can’t compete with machines or computers may be returned to the infantile state of being able to play full-time in a socialist economy of abundance. The machines might end up running themselves, generating massive wealth for everyone; capitalist struggle would be obsolete, and we’d no longer have to rationalize the atrocities committed to reinforce civilization by inventing the ideal of manliness.

Of course, that’s just a utopian scenario, but it raises the question of whether having a full-time job ought to be our dream in life. If we had to choose between (a) playing full-time “professionally,” relying on machines to do all the heavy lifting, and (b) being a self-made man (or woman), relying mainly on your talents in a capitalist competition for private gain, we’d choose (b) because we’ve been trained to esteem manliness.

Westerners, “individualists,” and neoliberals ridicule socialists and collectivist societies for heading towards the dead end of communism, for turning the masses into wards of the state who will be deprived of any reason to get out of bed in the morning, with no fulfilling job to occupy their time. “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop,” as the Protestant proverb has it. But is that just our model of civilization speaking through us? Should we want to occupy most of our free time with what’s often an unfulfilling job?

After all, another difference between Paleolithic and civilized labour is that the former is done out of necessity, whereas the latter serves manufactured desires to generate profit (surplus value) and is therefore biologically optional. Most jobs in developed societies are therefore of the bullshit variety: they’re for middle managers that are being made obsolete by machines and computers, or they’re for widget-makers whose kitschy products end up in landfills.

Divine paradise

So, should we approve of a society that turns most of its citizens into drones? Recall God’s curse on Adam in the Garden of Eden myth:

Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat food from it
all the days of your life.
It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
and to dust you will return.

The idea is that when we saw we could progress by obtaining knowledge, we became tied to the land as we had to farm to support the instrument of that progress, which was sedentary society. This myth idealizes the remote past when we presumably didn’t have to work much for a living and could play as naïve, innocent protohumans. Again, Stone Age life was likely not so idyllic, although it probably had its advantages. Still, the biblical curse makes for a critique of civilized manhood, which raises the question: Is work more like a curse or a blessing, a burden that degrades us or a necessary condition of our maturity?

Even as we’re bound to be outcompeted by our technology, we have difficulty imagining a worthwhile life without labour. And even as we long for a God-given paradise in an afterlife, we repudiate socialist societies that try to end this degradation, because we fear that threat to our manhood. We seem ambivalent and confused, which is just as well because there’s no objective answer here or preordained life plan that we’re supposed to follow.

Perhaps manliness in our current, precarious condition is the courage to accept the humbling tautology that what will be will be. By yoking ourselves to technology, we’re no longer masters of our fate. Manly men become slaves to their work until their work is automated and they’re left behind and reduced to being socialist citizens, wealthy elites, or impoverished vagrants who live like carefree children.

Either way, macho manliness is a trap and an illusion.

Intellectuals like to have a map of where they are in history, as part of their bid to fulfill the old imperative of knowing themselves. How can we know ourselves if we don’t know where we are in the big picture?

Thus, intellectuals often divide history into stages and talk about abstractions such as “medievalism” and “modernity.” Supposedly, modernity ended in the late twentieth century, so that now we’re living in the wreckage of the modern period’s deflated metanarratives.

Ours is the era of “postmodern” doubt, cynicism, apathy, relativism, anxiety, and alienation. If modernists killed God with Reason, and Reason proved an inadequate idol, we’re left naked in the wasteland, like King Lear who cried out in a storm,

Blow winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow!
You cataracts and hurricanes, spout
Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks…
Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ th’ world.
Crack nature’s molds, all germs spill at once
That makes ingrateful man…
I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness…
Then let fall
Your horrible pleasure. Here I stand your slave,
A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man.

But postmodernists grew weary of such existential self-flagellation. After all, it’s hard to keep consuming merchandise, as part of the developed world’s decadent class, when you’re in a morbid mood. It’s hard to suspend your disbelief and submit to the advertiser’s flattery when postmodern irony leads you to acknowledge your smallness and the effrontery of all ideological boasts.

Consequently, some postmodernists prefer to think of themselves as “metamodern,” as having transcended this supposed dichotomy between modern naïve optimism and postmodern pessimism.

Hanzi Freinacht’s metamodernism

In an introductory article on his version of metamodernism, for instance, Hanzi Freinacht — a pseudonym used by a pair of theorists, to which I’ll adhere for convenience— agrees with an earlier pair of metamodernists who said in a 2010 essay “Notes on Metamodernism” that the trick is to oscillate between the apparent poles.

Specifically, that earlier pair said, “metamodernism oscillates between the modern and the postmodern. It oscillates between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naïveté and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity.”

Freinacht says the oscillation is possible because of hindsight. Modern optimism is reborn since cynics can retrieve

the modern qualities lacking in postmodernity: enthusiasm, hope, unity, totality, purity. While we all know that these things taken by themselves create all the evil hotchpotches of modern times — Stalinism, fascism, the New Age, market-oriented neoliberalism, state socialism — now has come the time when we are sufficiently saturated with postmodern irony and critique to let them in again, through the back door.

He adds, “Now we can hurry up to hope and progress, just to hurry back to criticism and deconstruction of the same. Oscillating. We can create little utopias, small syntheses and try to build a more globally sensitive and ecologically concerned culture. We can allow ourselves that spark, because we today have more means to criticize it, to know it’s never all that, never a final answer.”

Freinacht thinks the metamodern stance is “cool,” and that “This coolness stems from the ability to be both ironic and sincere at the same time.” Think, he says, of “Metamodern music, softly alluding to the vastness and mystery of reality, the transhuman and superhuman potentials of man — but putting it in a silly pop song and getting drunk to it.”

Freinacht adds to this gloss on oscillation a Hegelian dialectical view of history. Like the modernists, he thinks history is divided into progressive stages, with metamodernism being superior to postmodernism. In his words,

While you can see metamodernism as a time period, a series of trends that simply came after postmodernism, I would still suggest a little stage theory can come in handy. I would suggest that metamodernism can indeed be viewed as a higher stage than postmodernism. But don’t worry, I’ll oscillate right back.

As a postmodernist who doesn’t succumb to naïve optimism about purported rational absolutes, Freinacht thinks he’s nevertheless entitled to some such progressive model because his model “includes postmodernism, but transcends it, allowing me more freedom of thought and action.”

The postmodernist just uses modern tools (such as the concept of secular progress) with the benefit of historical hindsight, knowing they’re mere tools that have some practical advantages but that they don’t support absolute answers. This pragmatic, ironic standpoint is supposed to be the oscillation, the metamodern mediation between modern and postmodern convictions.

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The modern was always already “postmodern”

Now, if metamodernism is just the attempt to reconcile the early and late-modern periods of Western thought, I’m a metamodernist too. But alas, early modernists would also have been “metamodern” since they were already “postmodern.”

Remember that early modern thinkers, from René Descartes to Immanuel Kant, were seeking new foundations for European cultures after the collapse of Christendom. No one had a better sense of social fragility than those thinkers who contrasted the modern with the medieval.

As deists, they understood that our species is on its own to flourish or perish, and they appreciated that the modern world of science, capitalism, democracy, and personal liberty could fail just as decisively as the medieval one had failed in the shadow cast by the Black Death in the fourteenth century. By thinking of the bubonic plague in mainly theological rather than empirical terms, Western European elites in the Church had proved hopelessly inept, and 30% to 50% of Europeans died as a result.

True, these thinkers were relatively optimistic about reason, and they pushed philosophical arguments as far as they could, but that’s because they wanted to explore the territory of ideas, like scientists. They, too, presented their models, ontologies, anthropologies, and epistemologies. But some degree of relativism was always built into those theories precisely because they were offered as modern rather than medieval, or as skeptical and liberal rather than dogmatic and Scholastic.

Indeed, the so-called oscillation between humanistic self-assertion and sobering humility was found in ancient Greek thought, such as in the pairing of Plato’s lofty metaphysics with his elitist assumption that the unphilosophical masses should be fed “noble lies,” as in edifying myths. Greek and Shakespearean tragedies deem our progressive conceits to be hubristic, so they juxtapose our paltry autonomy with a cosmic perspective, according to which we’re fated to be caught up in inhuman processes.

Moreover, Western modernism includes Romanticism and Existentialism, such as Hegel’s ironic historicizing of philosophical standpoints — and that’s all the basis for cynicism a postmodernist could want. Just as the positivists themselves deflated their empiricist pretentions, modernists in general followed their rational train of thought to critiques of rationalism, liberalism, and industrial progress. In 1781, for instance, Immanuel Kant published Critique of Pure Reason.

So paradoxically, the modern Enlightenment of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy was already fully “postmodern,” meaning that that period was self-critical.

Modern art, too, was implicitly “postmodern” in the same respect since, in freely exploring various artistic media and subject matters, rather than adhering to religious dogmas and conservative traditions, these artists presented their art as mere human products, not as apologies for divine revelations. These were individualist paintings, poems, or musical compositions, in which case such artists implicitly saw themselves, too, as standing alone like Lear, howling into the void.

How is this possible? Is the dichotomy between the modern and postmodern bogus, leaving no room for the metamodern? Not exactly.

We should think of these things not so much as distinct historical periods but as secular moods or stances. Some thinkers are bolder or more naïve than others, just as some are uplifting while others are melancholy. A thinker or artist can be both at different times.

Granted, we can generalize about periods, contrasting early modern self-confidence with late-modern anxiety. Technological changes certainly make for different environments to which we must adapt. Television and the internet foster a degree of mass cynicism that would have been hard to sustain in the medieval period, before the invention even of the printing press.

Yet contrary to a Hegelian metamodernist like Freinacht, the problem isn’t really dialectical in a historical sense, and as I’ve argued elsewhere, the oscillation in question amounts to little more than a neoliberal apology for the consumer’s state of bewilderment, due to the overabundance of goods to consume. Oscillation between options must be mindless, whereas we’re supposed to be thinking with the Age of Enlightenment under our belt.

Modernity: the stakes of living with unvarnished knowledge

No, the problem of reconciling the modern with the postmodern is about sustaining a secular humanist outlook or society despite the debilitating effects of scientific and philosophical knowledge.

Again, the early-modern thinkers and artists already had that knowledge, compared to medieval priests and peasants. The modernists emphasized their rational and creative constructs, but the explicit self-doubt emerged at least with Romanticism and Existentialism, two centuries before The Simpsons and South Park in the late twentieth century.

But think of the literal meaning of “postmodern”: that which comes after modernity. In so far as the modern period is about falling back on our secular, human abilities to prosper despite our recognition that the theistic cultures that sustained the ancient world were naïve, what would have to come after modernity is nothing short of apocalyptic self-destruction, followed by a postapocalyptic dark age of lamentations.

Those are the stakes of modernity. We’ll find a way to carry on, despite the sobering effects of all knowledge, including the knowledge possessed by ancient elites in Greece, India, and China, and even by the shamanic outsiders in hunter-gatherer societies. Either that or we won’t, and we’ll likely destroy ourselves because of the disparity between our technological empowerment and our lack of personal or cultural resolve.

What comes after modernity is hardly just a period of cynical self-doubts. On the contrary, modernity includes those doubts, and modernity may usher in the truly post-modern by destroying itself with them. For instance, our modern self-doubts, anxieties, and alienation could lead to wild populist backlashes and tribal polarization that provoke a third world war, and what would follow such a war would be the true postmodern condition, the fallout from the failure of secular humanism.

The stakes are straightforward, contrary to the pretentious overcomplications of leading so-called postmodern thinkers like Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard.

We live either with delusions or knowledge. The ancient world was relatively naïve in taking its religious brands at face value. The ancients trusted in their gods and thus the royal elites who represented them. The medieval period in Europe was an interim in which Christians wrestled with the contradiction between Jesus’s counterculture and the political imperatives of Christendom. Those self-doubts fueled the search for an alternative to Christian dogmatism; hence, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and so on.

This post-medieval period prided itself on its relatively objective (scientific) search for knowledge, as opposed to its deference to the dictates of authority figures. Reason was opposed to faith, and unleashed reason made many troubling discoveries, such as the inhuman extent of nature, plus the godlessness of that whole domain. World-historic modernity, then, rather than so-called postmodernity, is about living with that real knowledge that replaces the Orwellian submission to delusions.

The question for modernists has always been whether unvarnished knowledge of our status as clever mammals in nature can sustain a noble way of life. In other words, can we live as bona fide people that have transcended an animal’s state of relative ignorance, or is personhood a curse, a terrestrial trick played on our species, dooming us to self-extinction?

So-called “postmodernists” just emphasize modernity’s downside, the self-doubts that follow from real knowledge, rather than the progress that knowledge generates.

Wherefore, then, “metamodernism”? Again, in so far as metamodernists ponder this instability of modernism, which is to say the instability of personhood and the secular humanist outlook that science and philosophy virtually entail, metamodern reflection would be a worthy endeavour. My philosophy would be metamodern in that broad sense since I mean to combine naturalism, humanism, pantheism, cosmicism, pragmatism, and transhumanism to outline a worthy worldview, one that withstands hyper-modern self-doubt.

But if the metamodern is bound by this silly placeholder concept of dazed oscillation, I’m no metamodernist because I philosophize rather than propagandize.

They spoke once about an Age of Reason, when “Renaissance men” were hailed as geniuses because of their intellectual discoveries and innovations.

Yet we’re living now in a so-called postmodern condition of apathy and cynicism.

Our heroes are gross anti-intellectuals like Donald Trump, Time Magazine’s Person of the Year in 2016 and 2024.

The internet was supposed to unite everyone by presenting us with the same information and opportunities, but the opposite happened: we’re encouraged to explore our walled gardens and clash with endless streams of opposing worldviews. Deranged conspiracy theories flood social media platforms because the truth is too complicated and unsexy for the big tech companies. Our discourse is increasingly dominated by spoiled, enfeebled left-wing ideologues and their toxic counterparts on the authoritarian right.

Ours looks like a sophistical Age of Post-Reason. Rationalists, we assume, were always naïve in thinking that reason can tell us the neutral facts. That was only ever a myth, a “metanarrative,” since everything is politicized and all we’re doing when we think or speak is telling ourselves and each other various stories. Nonfiction is still a genre of storytelling, we assume, as even journalists call their reports “stories.” There’s the story of how a third of Americans re-elected Trump in the 2024 presidential election, and there are the news stories of global warming, Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine, and Israel’s demolition of Gaza.

All just stories. How so?

It’s because our media for consuming this “content” splashes these reports across our screens that host in the next minute cat videos, podcast rants, AI-manufactured images, and other inanities. There’s only an equalizing stream of content, in which case the medium is the message, and the distinction between fact and fiction is lost along the way.

There are no gatekeepers any longer to tell us authoritatively what’s true and false since the liberal and neoliberal technocratic professionals disgraced themselves by overpromising progress. In the 1980s and ’90s, bankers and titans of industry co-opted the pseudoscientific field of economics to promote the fiction of trickle-down wealth and the presumption that capitalism is compatible with democracy. Ever since the scientific and industrial revolutions, the Global North has been racing to “progress” by growing its economies, conquering the wilderness by exploiting its resources, and inventing technologies to raise living standards.

But then we discovered that this progress was unsustainable and self-destructive all along, that we’ve perpetrated the sixth mass extinction to support our infantile consumer lifestyles. We’ve been overconsuming trash to enrich the top half of the richest one percent of the population, relying on the Global South to manufacture disposable, trendy items for slave wages.

We don’t trust experts anymore. After all, the internet makes us all feel as though we can master any field just by watching the relevant ten-minute tutorial video. Who needs doctors’ diagnoses when there’s WebMD? Who needs politicians when lobbyists dictate their policies and write the legislation? Who needs masterful artists when there’s bottomless AI-generated content? Who needs warehouse workers when there are gigantic machines that do all the heavy lifting?

Over the last two decades, we’ve shown that we prefer authoritarian leaders like Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Viktor Orban, Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, and Nicolás Maduro. These leaders reveled in the authenticity of their corruption and audacity, revealing themselves to be the rot that remains when we no longer believe in our religious or secular myths of progress.

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A few centuries ago, science and philosophy undermined religion, but then reason undermined itself. We see this even in the institutions of science, which capitalism has largely captured just as it’s captured democratic governments and artists’ pursuit of creativity.

There’s the replication crisis in the soft sciences, and even a crisis in fundamental physics, as the physicist Sean Carroll explains. The business of theoretical physics in colleges prevents the department heads from gambling by hiring physicists who don’t subscribe to mainstream theories and whose models might prove fruitless in the long-term. Thus, because its early promoters oversold string theory’s theoretical richness and bullied competitors, a cult of string theory has prospered for decades even though it’s not supported by data.

Due to Donald Trump’s foregrounding of his alliance with big tech companies, and his crass pay-to-play schemes, the transparency of Trump’s oligarchy in his second term as president relieves Americans of any vestige of liberal pride. Evidently, democracy has always been just as vulnerable to corruption as a monarchy. As Plato and Aristotle said, democracy is liable to be swayed by demagogues who exploit unregulated discourse and the weakness of most people’s critical faculties.

And while there are still countless starving artists, including novelists, musicians, and painters, most artists have become “content creators,” serving in the gig economy that big tech companies have established. We marvel at how technology enables us all to create art, but as we immerse ourselves in this content, we succumb to the bathos of realizing that the very overabundance cheapens the artworks, so that we presume the consumption of art ought to be free.

If anyone can produce art with the new technologies, maybe art has no value. Maybe AIs should be welcome to colonize these fields. If soulless quasi-AIs can generate art of all kinds, maybe there’s never been a neoshamanic quest for self-knowledge, as in the heeding of a daemon’s call to sublimate your unconscious intuitions. Maybe the artist’s mystique has always been a sham, just like the mystique of “modernity.”

Practically all cultures have deemed themselves the height of human achievement, just as every well-adjusted individual thinks of himself or herself as the star of the show. This is the foolishness of pride that our genes ingrain in us since otherwise we wouldn’t think life is worth living or struggle to survive and reproduce despite the scarce resources and unfair odds.

But how much of this is just the whining of spoiled consumers who mistake First World annoyances for grave “crises”? We speak of the “meaning crisis,” for example, which is supposed to bedevil developed societies. But we’re so shallow that we can find meaning in tea leaves, cloud formations, or burn marks on toast. We’re like Narcissus who is entranced by his reflection, and we see our reflections everywhere. We’re liable to personify everything to avoid the feeling of being alone. We project mental and social properties onto inhuman, asocial facts, to extend our home territories.

Thus, a third of Americans found meaning in the cult of Trump, the Democratic third will find meaning in opposing American quasi-fascism, and the third that didn’t vote finds meaning in drinking beer and watching television after a hard day’s labour.

If there really were a meaning crisis, why wouldn’t the masses flock to hear what philosophers are saying, enriching those intellectuals rather than the big tech giants? In a sense, there’s no crisis because most of us are so easily misled. We elevate mundanities, making idols out of profanities. When a fad passes, we’re quick to concoct a replacement, and the endless stream of content brings us a smorgasbord of possible “meanings” or diversions.

We may nevertheless whine about a meaning crisis to feel heroic and prophetic. Yet the real crisis is that we might lose sight of the mystery that hides in plain view. Metaphysically speaking, there’s something afoot when conceivably there might have been nothing, so the something-maker is present in everything, in Trump, Kamala Harris, and the nonvoter, for example, or in both the rich and the poor, or our planet and all the others. Recognizing the strangeness of existence should inspire a sacred, ennobling way of life.

The real meaning crisis is that we lack the discipline to pursue such a course because, again, we’re so easily distracted. Perhaps the postmodern condition, therefore, is the proliferation of profane life options. We fixate on our personal liberties so that we welcome a society that caters to our myriad tastes. Possibilities beset us until we lose the inspiration to deem any of them especially worthy. Postmodernity is when too much progress becomes poisonous.

The Global South, or the relatively undeveloped nations, must look at those of us who complain about having too much progress, and say to themselves, “Cry me a river.” In which case we deserve our brutish, authoritarian leaders since we spoiled consumers regard our societies as automated and invulnerable, so we elect brutes for their entertainment value.

Everything’s a cynical, ironic game in the postmodern condition. But the liberties unleashed by science, capitalism, and democracy were supposed to make us all kings and queens of our castles. Maybe that’s just what happened, and we’re all as vapid and selfish as aristocrats once were, engrossed in our trivial pursuits when we should be humbled by our greater mission: to undo the absurdity of nature’s godlessness.

As a hotbed of religious and philosophical inspirations for social equality and human rights, the Axial Age in the middle of the first millennium BCE was like the revenge of the nerds.

In effect, in India, China, Persia, Palestine, and Greece, the outcast gurus, prophets, and philosophers protested the stratification of castes in kingdoms and empires that appealed to polytheism to excuse mass slavery. Just as most humans were the gods’ playthings, most of humanity served at the royal class’s pleasure.

This is because these ancient mystical dissidents functioned like shamans in revealing the dictates of the spirit world or the conscience that was often buried in the unconscious. They posited abstractions such as Atman, Brahman, the one true God, the natural creativity of Logos, or the cognitive powers of personhood, and these abstractions implied that slaves were metaphysically or spiritually equal to kings.

Apocalyptic progress

One of the key innovations in the lead-up to the monotheistic, Abrahamic religions was Zoroastrianism’s conception of history as being linear rather than cyclical. According to daily perceptions, nature operated instead in cycles that governed everything from the seasons and the migrations of animal herds to the milestones of life, including birth, reproduction, aging, and death.

This cyclical conception of time was antithetical to progress, so societies that affirmed these cycles were inherently conservative. If the future will only repeat the past, just as the Sun will rise again tomorrow as it did yesterday, there’s no sense in trying to change the natural order. If men governed throughout the civilized past, they should keep governing in the future. If animals busy themselves with their evolutionary aims of finding food, shelter, mates, and guarding their territory, humans should do likewise.

In short, for conservatives, natural cycles set the agenda, according to a brazen resort to what philosophers would later call the naturalistic fallacy.

But Zoroastrianism proposed something very different, an apocalyptic, divinely revealed, hidden supernatural pattern that’s working itself out in time. This pattern is linear in that time itself will end with a moral rather than a natural victory. Goodness and truth will triumph over badness and lies, and our job isn’t to keep doing what we’ve always been doing thanks to conservative traditions.

Instead, we should set our sights on that ultimate endpoint of history and the ideals that that final triumph will realize. We should judge ourselves according to what hasn’t yet transpired anywhere in nature, so that instead of deferring to natural cycles, we should strive to be supernatural. This implies that the conservative traditions of gross social inequality, such as patriarchy, slavery, and monarchy, should be overturned in an ascetic, anti-natural lifestyle.

This Persian innovation impacted Judaism during the end of the Babylonian captivity in the sixth century BCE, so that Jews, too, began fantasizing about the world’s messianic salvation. Judaism provided fertile soil for this radicalism because Jews belonged to an underclass in world-historical terms. To borrow Friedrich Nietzsche’s formulation, Jews were “slaves” rather than “masters,” so they looked for myths and rationales to soothe their alienation.

Having been conquered by various empires, Jews saw themselves as suffering servants of a righteous God, a deity that transcends nature and thus represents a supernatural ideal. This God would make fools out of the worshippers of polytheistic idols and natural cycles. While God made all things in nature, he calls on Jews — and by extension everyone, who ought to follow Jewish monotheism — to be moral, not strictly natural or animalistic.

So Jewish “slaves” determined what counts as spiritually moral. More precisely, the neo-shamanic Jewish prophets who seemed to speak for God, and who were often at odds even with conventional Jewish society, channeled an apocalyptic sense of the need for a repudiation of natural and political norms. Whereas the strong tend to dominate the weak, God fights on behalf of the weak, his “chosen people,” the longsuffering Jews.

Christians would go on to combine that Jewish alienation and moralizing with Greco-Roman philosophy, the Roman Empire itself, and thus an imperial political mission. While Rome sought to conquer all the world’s territories, Christendom would aim to conquer everyone’s minds and convert them all to this one true faith. Again, all Christian eyes were set on Judgment Day, when God would redeem Jesus’s gospel and glorify those who had been last in conventional, natural terms, while sending to perdition those who had thrived in such ungodly times and persecuted the righteous losers who were “spiritually poor.”

Muslims maintained this apocalyptic outlook but preferred the relative purity and strictness of Jewish monotheism to Christianity’s implicit polytheism. So, while Christians regarded Jesus as a god or an avatar who was somehow exclusively identical to the one true God, Muslims agreed with Jews that Jesus was just an exemplary prophet.

But whereas Jews perfected existential alienation and the resulting pragmatic humanism that you find in Ecclesiastes, because Judaism was based on Jews’ experience of being marginalized nomads, Muslims set about conquering lands in their prophet’s name.

Islamic morality was about submitting to the mightier force that was honour-bound to be graceful and hospitable, like the desert Bedouin, rather than overbearing and nakedly tyrannical. Islam itself is just a code for submitting to Allah, the mightiest force of all. God is so powerful that his will can’t be naturally resisted because Allah reigns from a supernatural vantage point that Muslims sought to emulate by conquering vast territories.

Paradoxically, then, Muslims were dominators with the moralistic mentality that belongs to the dominated. The paradox is resolved when we observe that Muslims began as outcasts, inhabiting some of the world’s desert regions, places where life in general is on the outskirts. Indeed, the Muslim world is still confined mostly to the deserts of North Africa and the Middle East. (Only a quarter of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims live in Southeast Asia.)

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Humanistic progress

But not all the Axial Age’s revolutions were apocalyptic or guided by theology. By comparison, the ancient Greeks especially were philosophical humanists (along with Chinese Confucians and some philosophical schools in India). The Greeks, too, posited underlying causes of events, but they did so with rational, proto-scientific arguments. Ancient humanistic philosophy, though, was far from a neutral reflection of facts, contrary to modern secular propaganda. Instead, this philosophy of our place in nature was meant to provide a way of life and even a rationale for human dominion over animals.

While the monotheists used religious myths as selling points for morality that favours those who would naturally be dominated, such as hypersensitive introverts and neurotic idealists, philosophical humanists would use reason to exploit the natural order and empower our species.

And of course, this ancient secular humanism regained a foothold in the West when, after the fiasco of the Church’s handling of the Black Death, early modern thinkers in the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution turned to pre-Christian Greco-Roman texts, fueling a sense of godless human progress that secularized or “modernized” Europe and some of its colonies.

Comparing the varieties of progress

What we have here are two conceptions of progress. Both monotheists and secular humanists think of history as being subject to linear advances, so that cultures can be compared, for instance, depending on the extent to which they conform to certain ideals that don’t equate with natural norms. But monotheists think this progress is guaranteed since God foreordained it, and no created thing can thwart God’s will, not even his rebellious angels.

While some secular humanists (like Georg Hegel and Karl Marx) think progress is metaphysically or economically guaranteed, most of these thinkers assume any such progress would have to be supported by nature, and nature is neutral towards our values. Thus, while monotheists are supposedly assured to prosper in the afterlife, according to their respective religions, there’s no philosophical or scientific consensus that humanists or our species will be able to sustain our reign over nature. We could destroy ourselves in the attempt to apply our scientific knowledge with technology, or the planet’s cycles could ruin us because we lack the ingenuity to circumvent them.

Monotheistic progress is supernatural, so it entails the undoing of the whole “fallen,” natural order. Similarly, the most radical secular humanist fantasies project that the will of intelligent species could overtake nature, in an apocalyptic taming of all wild things. Again, though, setting such science fiction aside, most secular humanists are far more cautious and moderate. For them, godless human progress means using our anomalous cognitive traits to our advantage while working within natural limits, without destroying ourselves or the ecosystems in the process.

While religious apocalypticism developed from marginalized sensibilities, secular humanism sprang mainly from the golden age of ancient Athens, and launched “modernity,” which is to say the greatest spread of liberal, secular advances in civilized history, starting in Europe in the fourteenth century CE.

Monotheistic morality is ascetic in contrasting natural cycles with a supernatural mission: this moralist is supposed to subdue his or her natural impulses, ignore the dictates of profane social conventions, and adhere to a prophetic calling that makes sense only in supernatural, “spiritual” terms.

By contrast, secular morality is pragmatic or “realistic,” even as it, too, holds out the prospect of progress. This is to say that humanism is liberal rather than conservative. Modern conservatives are closer to the ancient polytheists in using religions as excuses not for progress but for earthly tyrannies. These religions told a story that rationalized the dubious status quo that adapted most social animals’ penchant for forming dominance hierarchies. Such conservatives don’t think of humanity as an ideal but defer to the prevalence of dominant and submissive castes or “races.”

Humanists idealize our species’ potential, as they uphold a vision of where we all ought to go and how we should get there. In effect, modern humanists secularize the monotheist’s myth of progress. We can’t count on a deus ex machina but must shrewdly engineer our welfare, like Odysseus. The point of liberalism, of course, is to liberate humanity, including the lower and middle classes, women and minorities, and the mentally ill and disabled. We should use our know-how and ingenuity to solve all our problems, to terraform nature and perfect our bodies, minds, and cultures.

The political philosopher Eric Voegelin made roughly this point in 1952 in The New Science of Politics, when he spoke of how so-called secular “Gnostics” “immanentized the eschaton,” or attempted to build a utopia on earth. Voegelin said, “The problem of an eidos [form or essence] in history, hence, arises only when a Christian transcendental fulfillment becomes immanentized. Such an immanentist hypostasis [substrate or guarantor] of the eschaton [the world’s supernatural ending], however, is a theoretical fallacy.”

On the contrary, the fallacy was Voegelin’s if he assumed that reason was crucial to the original, supernatural conception of the “eschaton.” Only on that assumption could we speak of “fallacies” in theology that are distinct from a logical talk of gods, prophecies, and miracles. There’s no such rationally legitimate theistic discourse. We’re dealing here with art and fantasies that served social purposes, such as the underclass’s dignification or, more exoterically, the upper class’s glorification. Storytellers are free to adapt motifs to different contexts, which is what the early modern humanists did with their religious heritage.

In any event, according to this secular account of progress, modern cultures are supposed to be superior to premodern ones in that the former hold out this prospect of human advances, whereas the latter, for all their talk of the supernatural, are more likely to be defeatist in succumbing to some natural impulse or compromise.

For instance, whereas Judaism and Christianity have mostly been modernized (or liberalized and neutered, at least in the Global North), Islam still works largely as it always has, in relatively benighted, apocalyptic, “medieval” terms. Most Muslims are anti-natural only in some respects since they model God on conservative grounds, depicting him as a male, honourable king.

Trumpism: the dystopia of a secular apocalypse

Notice, though, that apocalypticism can also infiltrate secular societies such as the United States. Trumpism is effectively a secular revenge fantasy, led by the deranged outcast Donald Trump and his cabal of Christian fundamentalists and billionaire tech nerds. This cabal speaks mainly to the country’s neglected rural regions, the ones that have been hit hardest by the failed promises of neoliberal economists.

Trump is somewhat like the Buddha in that he grew up with great wealth and opportunity but abandoned conventional thinking to pursue a radical course. Of course, those two courses are opposed to each other in that the Buddha rejected egoism whereas Trump is a raging narcissist. Still, neither a buddha nor Trump would belong in polite company. Both are radicals, from the perspective of conventional, profane mores.

Trump, too, fantasizes about an apocalyptic demolition since he thinks of himself as a god or colossal “winner” among countless losers. While the monotheist’s God will bulldoze everything that fails to live up to his standards, including everyone who rejects God’s prophets and scriptures or who even denies that God exists, Trump means to destroy everyone who opposes him or fails to humour his grandiose self-image. So, while modern humanism secularizes the monotheistic fantasies of revenge against the natural order, Trump adapts those fantasies to serve his gross personality disorder (malignant narcissism).

In any case, we should beware the difference between supernatural and natural forms of progress. The former is apocalyptic in that it’s supposedly revealed from a standpoint that ought to compel us to abandon all mundane worldly pursuits. The latter is liberal, pragmatic, and humanistic in that it seeks to make the best of our existential condition as clever, ambitious primates adept at finding opportunities for improvement in a cosmic wasteland.

Early Buddhists and the ancient Greek philosophers, from Democritus and Plato to Epicurus and Protagoras, were convinced that philosophical knowledge is a comfort in that it reconciles you with the world so you’re at peace.

The Greeks called this enlightened state “ataraxia,” meaning tranquility or imperturbability.

As Thomas McEvilly explains in The Shape of Ancient Thought, “Both Indian and Greek philosophers held the highest ethical good to be an attitude which regards with the same emotion or valuation those events which are to one’s personal worldly advantage — such as pleasures and fulfilled intentions — and those which are not — such as pains and frustrated intentions…The ethics of imperturbability involves an attempt to get one’s mind beyond the fluctuations of pleasure and pain.”

So, the wise person was expected to be mentally stable and to avoid extreme emotional reactions. “The happiness of tranquility is like the mental state of a god, whose natural condition is stable, as opposed to the immediacy of grasped-at pleasures which come and go.”

Yet present-day, late-industrial philosophy features an existential reaction to the fruits of the Scientific Revolution, and according to that view, there’s a crisis of meaninglessness, of life’s apparent absurdity, which makes for the opposite of inner peace.

Are these ancient and modern conceptions of wisdom compatible? Is one conception superior to the other? How should we think of the apparent conflict between them?

The imperturbability of ancient sages

McEvilly points out that there were roughly two kinds of Indian and Greek philosophical systems, the transcendental and the naturalistic. To attain imperturbability

is to disengage oneself from the ordinary patterns of motivation. In some contexts the disengagement is prescribed to promote a transcendentalist motivation. Sensations are considered unreal in comparison with some hypersensual realm; the goal is to become “dead to this world” (impassive, impartial, equanimous, indifferent) to gain access to higher Being. This transcendentalist approach is found in Platonism and Neoplatonism, the Vedanta, and most schools of Mahayana Buddhism.

In other contexts, such as Theravada Buddhism and Epicureanism, this-worldly experience is accepted as what is given to deal with. Imperturbability is advised not in hopes of attaining a transcendental viewpoint but on naturalistic grounds, in response to the uncontrollability of experience.

So, the former systems were essentially dualistic, the idea being that there’s a hidden, abstract reality that redeems the apparent unfairness, impermanence, and suffering in nature. Philosophical knowledge amounts to knowledge of the hidden, unnatural world, which leads the sage to disassociate from the material plane and specifically his or her emotions. The transcendental sage exercises rational self-control rather than being led hither and thither by emotional reactions to stimuli because the sage is fixated on a metaphysical unity of all things or on Plato’s intellectual Forms, which are recognized by introspection or reason.

Meanwhile, naturalists like the atomists and Epicureans were more like the early Buddhists in taking the object of philosophical knowledge to be the causal order. Knowledge of the great extent to which events are causally determined and thus forced to happen, together with mindfulness of how unwholesome psychological mechanisms afflict us, opens the possibility of retraining the mind to observe causal chains without being manipulated by stimuli and buffeted by natural events.

As McEvilly says in relation to early Buddhism,

The condition of mind which results from this alteration in mental process is characterized by stability or steadiness (thitata). The steadied mind no longer runs this way in pursuit of unobtainable pleasures or that way in flight from inescapable pains. It is no longer thrown about by the impermanence of the vedanas [sensations]. Gain and loss, pleasure and pain, good and ill repute, and so on, are experienced with the same feeling tone, that is, with equanimity, imperturbability, steadiness, and so on.

The ancient naturalists were empiricists and even, in some cases, protopositivists who dismissed abstract theorizing as part of the problem since speculations can imprison us in unrealistic thought patterns, setting us up for disappointment when nature doesn’t oblige those vain preconceptions.

Despite these differences between the two outlooks, the upshot is the same: for these ancient philosophers, deep knowledge is supposed to put us at peace. Those who are not content with how things are are confused by their senses or by frivolous philosophy and religion. The unwise person gets caught up in conflicting shadows and fictions. She fails to appreciate either that there’s some structure beyond natural events or that these events can be observed from a mental distance without the emotional attachments and traumas.

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Nature’s monstrous scale

By contrast, the philosophy that builds on the profound discoveries of modern scientists is more likely to unsettle than reassure the wise person. Indeed, it sounds paradoxical even to speak of “modern wisdom” because the mark of the modern mentality is alienation, and we’d be more likely to pity an alienated person than revere him or her or seek this person’s guidance.

Were modern philosophers such as existentialists like Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Martin Heidegger led astray, or did they come to learn something about which the ancients were ignorant? Alternatively, is the difference one of mere emphasis?

Let’s set aside the transcendentalists and mystics like Plato, to make for a more direct comparison between ancient and modern naturalists. At first glance, it might look like the crucial difference is that modern philosophers know much more about how nature works. But this could amount to a mere multiplication of examples on the modern side, which might not be so crucial a distinguishing feature.

The Buddhists, Atomists, Epicureans, and Sophists were equally naturalistic in denying the possibility or at least the relevance of miracles, as in acausal events. They explained happiness and suffering as results of psychological mechanisms that were susceptible to therapies. Does adding empirical knowledge of ten thousand other natural mechanisms, including those that operate in distant galaxies, justify modern alienation or account for the sense that deep knowledge is disturbing rather than tranquilizing?

Possibly so, as the Sorites paradox shows. At some point, if you keep adding grains of sand to a heap, you build a mountain. There’s no obvious dividing line that separates the two, but the point is that differences in quantity can make for one of quality. A higher-level quality (being a mountain) emerges from lower-level activities (the adding of grains, one at a time).

Likewise, the vast increase in empirical knowledge of the extent of natural causality could entail a sobering realization that a fitting attitude towards nature isn’t neutrality or contentment but something like horror or alienation. In short, as I’ve argued elsewhere, scientific knowledge presents the universe as an inhuman monstrosity.

Modern progress

But let’s set that aside, too, for the moment. Another difference would be the broader cultural one that seeped into philosophy, namely what we regard as Western economic, political, and moral progress. The ancient world was known for its stability and its cyclical conception of time. Cycles predominated both in nature and the rise and fall of empires. Slavery, patriarchy, autocracy, and imperialism were the norms that recurred with the seasons, as it were.

As advanced as ancient societies were in comparison to what stripped-down life in the wild would be like, by numerous objective measures, human advancement — which is to say empowerment — took off with the rise of widespread science, capitalism, democracy, and the rule of law.

To take just one example, the global population started to rise sharply in the eighteenth century, and stratospherically in 1900, due to medical advances that reduced child mortality. The human population reached its first 100 million only in the second millennium BCE, and the first billion in the nineteenth century CE.

Freedom and alienation

Possibly, then, what made for the modern rethinking of enlightenment as a form of alienation or a reckoning with the horror of reality is the juxtaposition of those two revolutions: the realization of nature’s inhuman scale plus the anomaly of relatively recent human progress. Life seems absurd because of how this stunning progress occurred despite nature’s indifference, which makes that progress seem precious due to its unlikelihood and its estrangement from the rest of the universe.

In other words, what existentialists emphasized is human freedom despite advanced knowledge of causality in nature. Moreover, that emphasis wasn’t arbitrary, but was based on the experience of human progress which the ancients couldn’t have imagined.

Now, while some of the ancient philosophers were determinists, others maintained that we have limited freedom. Indeed, they argued we had just enough self-control to adjust our mental habits and reduce our unnecessary pains. But what modern progress shows is that our species has all along been potentially at war with nature. Our freedom extends far beyond the ability to tinker with our expectations. We project our values onto culture, which initiates feedback loops that alienate us from the wilderness, as we adhere not so much to the laws that regulate animal behaviour, but to fabricated social conventions that mass fictions prop up.

The ancient naturalistic sage holds out the freedom only of detached observation, not the collective production of an alternative, artificial world. This is to say that the ancient world was, of course, traditional and conservative, not revolutionary and progressive. More precisely, the ancient sage failed to credit the potential for the systematic unnaturalness that was apparent — as we now know from our greater knowledge of deep time — even in the advent of behavioural modernity in the Upper Paleolithic and the transition from nomadic tribes of foragers to sedentary societies.

The “freedom” in question is practically a synonym for how psychologists and philosophers would account for personhood. What it means to be a person rather than just a wild animal is to have a decisive measure of self-control, and this is the opposite of being tied down by natural causes.

The question at issue is the extent of that autonomy. Could we hope to end a state of natural suffering only by escaping to an outsider’s vantage point of serenity, exercising freedom strictly from emotional attachments? Again, what sets modern philosophers apart from their ancient counterparts is the confirmation of a second, collective refuge. Of course, modern developed societies aren’t utopian since they include many forms of suffering, but the point is that these social hardships aren’t part of the natural causal order. Instead, they’re self-imposed as part of our collective flight from naturalness or the universal wilderness.

Ancient and modern wisdom

Thus, in a sense, the ancient philosophical therapy would be superfluous in the modern world. The sage would recommend detachment from unhelpful mental habits, even in a world in which developed countries have systematically detached from nature’s unhelpful wildness!

To appreciate the unprecedented power of human freedom, as evidenced by scientific, capitalistic, democratic, and moral progress beginning in the fifteenth century CE, is simultaneously to notice how alien and precarious that freely undertaken adventure is in nature. The modern self-conception is practically schizophrenic in that we must hold together opposing bodies of knowledge. We must comprehend both the physical world’s godless indifference to every eventuality, and the human world’s effective rebellion against that indifference, the rebellion that takes the form of advanced industrial civilization.

What’s unsettling to modern sensibilities is that so much progress could be both possible and, in the long run, probably pointless. We know more than the ancients not just about the universe but ourselves. Moreover, this advance isn’t due to introspection but to the accumulation of knowledge of the past, which enables us to recognize the contrast between conservative and progressive societies.

Ancient philosophers may have been unsurpassed in their first-person scrutiny of mental processes (although cognitive scientists would beg to differ). But what the ancients couldn’t have studied were the wealth and power of modern societies that sustain populations of billions, and that grappled with quantum mechanics, took astronauts to the Moon, and liberated hundreds of millions of women and enslaved people from squalor.

Is it the case that the more you know, the more imperturbable you ought to be? No, because what you learn isn’t unity but disunity, the disjunction between wildness and artificiality, between nature’s neutrality and the pride of progressive humanity, between the universe’s pointless evolution and the ideals that inspire civilization.

The mark of a modern sage isn’t mental stability but the inner struggle to reconcile those evident dichotomies. The struggle may begin with existential angst and dread before it moves on to a coping mechanism such as artistic sublimation or comedic release.

We can detach emotionally all we want from our cognitive routines, serenely observing them and mirroring nature’s amoral oneness. In the modern world, that kind of objectivity will only call to mind the scientific methods that drive our technological and social progress, and that accentuate the split between how nature cares about nothing, whereas we care a lot about our capacity to be relatively unnatural.

Thus, the ancient wisdom takes us swiftly to the modern kind.

Did you know that so-called spirituality, the search for an existential purpose and profound answers to life’s deepest questions, is for outsiders?

Put bluntly, if you have those longings, you’re on a path to great loss. There’s no such thing as the civilized practice of spiritual excellence. This is because civilization is politically compromised, so if you’re interested in being “spiritually” grounded, you must circumvent certain social conventions. You must work around what society expects you to be, because those expectations typically favour the super-villainous psychopaths and their courtiers (kings, politicians, CEOs, spoiled consumers) who manage to control key institutions.

This means that if you specialize in the occupations that keep society afloat in its war against nature’s wildness, you can only kid yourself with toy spirituality, such as the kind promoted in the self-help or happiness industries. Fake spirituality is as politically compromised as the mainstream games you find in developed societies.

Eastern pragmatism

Eastern religions and philosophies, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Neo-Confucianism, have confronted this clash of expectations head-on. These traditions often eschew apocalyptic ecstasy and high-flying prophetic idealism, preferring a pragmatic kind of therapy that’s consistent with civility and the goal of preserving the collective welfare.

Hinduism coopted some Jain principles, for instance, but not the wholesale repudiation of egoism or the civilized project of domesticating nature. Jains are so preoccupied with “spirituality,” an idealistic vision of how things ought to be, that they go out of their way to avoid harming even insects, let alone animals or people. Could there conceivably be a Jain how-to manual for getting ahead in cutthroat business? Of course not. Jains don’t sell out like that.

Yet, Hindus say: to each their own. If you want to excel in business, worship, family life, or scholarship, there are moral, reverential ways of doing so. There are paths and stages in life that all lead to moksha, deep self-realization, so no one need be left out. The assumption is that civilization isn’t inherently unspiritual, since everything that exists flows from the same underlying divine reality, Brahman.

Hindu eclecticism fueled Western enthusiasm for spirituality and self-improvement in the 1960s. The promise was that you could have it both ways. You needn’t choose between acquiring an enlightened perspective and fulfilling your familial or occupational duties. You could be a sage at inner peace, and also a plumber, a parent, or even a politician.

Similarly, Neo-Confucianism integrated Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism into a grand synthesis in China. The idea was that we could cultivate ourselves without losing our spiritual perspective, provided that our social excellence “harmonizes” with natural processes. Nature and society both undergo processes, so some standards apply to each sphere. Again, we needn’t feel alienated from either nature or society by losing ourselves in some prophetic vision. Instead, we could excel by playing our part in the universe that’s inherently elevated.

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Civilized spirituality?

Yet those compromises are cover-ups that rationalize the upshot of the civilized endeavour, which is that people are at war with nature’s wildness. We haven’t been part of nature since we became “behaviourally modern” with our fascination with symbols tens of thousands of years ago. The sentient beings that are part of nature we call “animals,” and we enslave and extinguish them because we see further than they do — too far to be content with a naturally selected lifestyle. We usurped our Maker’s power over us by retreating to artificial refuges that run on cultural ideals that mean nothing to atoms, stars, or oceans.

If civilization has a spiritual purpose, it’s what early Christians would have called the Satanic one of dethroning our ultimate source by domesticating every trace of nature’s absurd incivility and impersonality. Nature isn’t a unified “cosmos” since it’s split into countless worlds, divided by a deadly, horrifically vast void, and nature consists of emergent levels and systems that labour under autonomous, incommensurate principles. Nature swallows itself in black holes, nullifies itself in quantum fluctuations, and extinguishes itself at the end of time. Oh, and nature evolves people who seek to impose their godlike will on everything.

We fool ourselves indeed if we think we can be both spiritual and socially useful. From a civilized standpoint, traditional spirituality is useless because it’s antithetical to economic growth and the utilitarian businesses of feeding the masses and keeping the lights on and the trains running on time.

Still, that doesn’t mean that those who excel in socially acceptable ways must be brutes. What’s needed, in short, is “spirituality” or existential growth that’s based on realistic dualism.

Realistic humanism

We should appreciate the audacity of so-called profane endeavours. Polite society is a tragically heroic gamble that intelligent mammals can improve their living conditions by exploiting nature’s mindlessness. Will we destroy ourselves in the process, or will we be able to keep innovating solutions to technical problems? For how long can the civilized oasis last, when the vast majority of species on Earth have gone extinct? Are we just preparing our kind to turn into something else, so that our vaunted elite ways of life are likely doomed?

Traditional spirituality is useless because it posits a supernatural alternative to nature, inviting us to speculate about the rigamaroles we must surmount to pass the gatekeepers to paradise in an afterlife. With so much historical hindsight, we should be able to see by now that the issue all along wasn’t supernature but anti-nature, as in civility, artificiality, the intelligent designs that are by-products of evolved personhood.

If you’re a plumber, you should be awestruck by your professional contribution to the anomaly of our implicit war on nature. The noble way of plumbing isn’t to lose yourself in the nitty-gritty routines, or forget the existential stakes in even this humble line of work. Enlightened plumbing would be based on realistic dualism, the understanding that undeluded spirituality is about building a better world, one that conforms to our prophetic visions. Idealism should meet with realism in that commonplace repudiation of our monstrous maker, which is the wild cosmos.

Where the politically correct Western spirituality goes wrong is its avoidance of the realistic side of secular humanism. By “realistic,” I mean that we should be cosmicists. We should understand the existential stakes of civilized progress: again, we’re at war with our monstrous, impersonal maker. It’s the Promethean, Satanic revolt. Of course, there’s no such perspective in the self-help and happiness industries.

No, spirituality for upper-class professionals is a saccharine endeavour of mouthing platitudes that amount to neoliberal propaganda for the social injustices that arise in this civilized war against nature. For example, one of the foundational books of this industry, How to Win Friends and Influence People, is written from a business perspective to streamline work-life by learning to manipulate your coworkers. Instead of oppressing them with your personal biases, learn to adopt your coworker’s perspective and use that insider information to get what you want out of the interaction.

That’s not exactly an evil lesson, but it misses the existential, “spiritual” point of friendship. Real friendships are antithetical to business interests, so that self-help book’s title should have been How to Win Acquaintances and Manipulate People. Friends are strangers whom you treat as family, based on mind-melds or heart-to-heart conversations with them. You don’t manipulate or double-cross family members, and therefore you don’t do so with friends. Yet business hierarchies don’t recognize friendships.

Businesspeople model themselves on the neoclassical concept of Homo economicus, the self-interested, rational calculator of utility who’s supposed to make capitalist competition work in the long run, preventing a descent into neofeudal inequalities governed by monopolies. If everyone can sometimes be as sociopathic as the actual sociopaths who tend to excel in politics and business, we’ll boycott companies that acquire too much power (because we’ll also be as omniscient as the robber barons of old), and we’ll reward entrepreneurs, ensuring that a capitalist marketplace regulates itself and heads towards a fair equilibrium in which everyone gets what they want.

Again, though, sociopaths don’t have friends. Homo economicus doesn’t recognize the importance of friends, or of quasi-family members who journey with you like soldiers who share your burden, bonded by camaraderie. Machiavellianism works in business and thus in mainstream Western societies, which is why all great fortunes are unethically amassed.

Spirituality and the existential condition

But my point is that the neoliberal propaganda you find in the self-help industry will confuse friends with acquaintances, muddying the waters and ignoring the existential context in which friendship arises. We want friends because we prefer not to be lonely. Why? Because when we’re alone, we must face our deepest fears and come to terms with our existential condition of being people in a godless, inhuman, cosmic wilderness. It’s easier to face that condition with friends.

So noble spirituality would be based on the kind of realism that still alienates much of mainstream society. Realistic dualism, which is to say secular humanism, properly understood, would drive us to clean up much of our act, so this standpoint would be bad for business as usual. Western societies are based on the early modern ethos of secular humanism, which gave rise to the institutions of science, capitalism, democracy, and free-thinking arts, but we’ve forgotten the realism that motivated that progress.

After the Black Death and the religious wars in medieval Europe, we had to establish a civilization that solves its problems without relying on archaic Church dogmas. We had to do so because, even if individuals have friends, our species is alone and lonely. Our species has no divine protector or life manual that guarantees its members’ everlasting happiness. People are alone and anomalous in the greater wilderness, the one that includes countless star systems.

Real spirituality is about confronting that existential predicament with honour, courage, and ingenuity.

Here’s my song on Islam’s sun god:

Daoists, Buddhists, pantheists, deep ecologists, and all those who have a mystical view of the naturalness and the interconnectedness of everything we perceive face the intriguing question of what our species amounts to from nature’s perspective, as it were.

From the humanistic vantage point, which is confused and impudent according to these nature mystics, we stand apart from nature in a crucial, existential sense. We progress by taming the wilderness, replacing natural processes with the artifices of civilization. Far from seeing ourselves as united with nature, we think we’re autonomous agents whose grim moral obligation isn’t to act out on our evolved impulses, but to envision improvements on nature’s wildness, and to bring them to fruition.

Again, this progressive independence must be illusory if, instead, in the grand, cosmic scheme, everything fulfills some natural function, or everything’s caught within a cosmic process or causal system.

What, then, is the natural function of personhood, or of humans, the cleverest, most ambitious of apes? From the human-centered standpoint, we can easily answer the comparable question. What we’re up to, as I said, is pursuing our cultural agendas in politics, business, and religion, and in our professional capacities, family lives, personal hobbies, and so on. We’re supporting politicians who share our social values, or we’re striving to build the best widget and sell it for a profit, or we’re aiming to fulfill God’s design.

But none of that can matter from a mystical perspective that takes naturalness to be the ultimate pattern. Where our species fits into that pattern should be expressible in purely empirical, objective terms that don’t presuppose a dichotomy between life and nonlife, mind and matter, or civilization and wilderness.

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It’s hard to guess at what that role might be without knowing where life generally fits into the nonliving universe. For all we know, the tree of life on our planet might be an outlier, and the more common trajectory of organic evolution that plays out in distant star systems or galaxies might differ from the terrestrial norms. Thus, even if we knew everything about life on Earth, from its origin to its endpoint — which we don’t, especially because life isn’t finished evolving here — we’d have only a small overall sample size to guide our speculations.

If we knew generally what life tends to do in the universal scheme, based on observations of many independent evolutions of life, we could generalize that life’s role in nature is to undergird some complex construction, or to serve in some solar transformation. But we don’t yet know whether there’s any such larger process at work since we don’t know that there’s any extraterrestrial life.

We know that life here is part of the carbon cycle, which figures in the planet’s equilibrium. Yet that observation supports the humanist’s dualism since our species threatens that equilibrium by generating excessive carbon from our industrial output. Thus, even if the carbon cycle were relevant to life’s overall role in nature, we still wouldn’t know that our species occupies that cosmic position. If anything, the evidence points in the other direction.

One possibility that crops up in science fiction is that organic forms transmute into the mechanical, so that machines, computers, and AI will replace animals and humans. Our role could be to serve as the go-betweens, as bridges between those eras.

Or perhaps we shouldn’t overcomplicate matters and should notice what’s hiding in plain sight. If our progress is deadly to terrestrial life, our job might be to correct for the advent of life. Perhaps life is anomalous in the universe, and even parasitic on it, so that nature re-establishes its lifeless balance not just by sending volcanoes and meteors to wipe out species, but by giving life enough rope with which to hang itself, as it were. With the transition of animals into people, life is lulled into hubris so that people act more recklessly, pursuing their progressive ventures that eventually terminate the delicate chemical balance that accidentally allowed for this organic anomaly.

This would be a dreadful nihilistic possibility that runs counter to secular humanism and calls the spiritual mystic’s bluff about a so-called higher, enlightened morality. If the universe is supposed to be lifeless, as it were, morality and spirituality are shams. Our natural, metaphysical role would be to act as life’s executioners, and to destroy ourselves ironically out of narrow self-interest.

Yet the deep ecologist or Eastern mystic means to reassure us with the talk of natural continuity. We’re supposed to welcome the fact that we figure in some underlying process that will persist long after we’re gone. Moreover, we’re supposed to gladly give up on our humanistic pretensions, willingly surrender our liberal right to pursue our personal happiness, and focus on the cosmic scheme.

What if that cosmic scheme is horrific, though? What if life is a pointless accident that negates itself like a clumsy clown who struts about on the stage before realizing he’s not cut out for show business and scurries off before the audience even knows he’s performed?

Of course, we can speculate as we like, but the point is that the mystic owes us some such explanation. This is especially so because science tells us not just about natural continuities but profound cosmic discontinuities.

For instance, there’s the split between the quantum and Einsteinian, spatiotemporal worlds, and between the interior and exterior of black holes. Perhaps those dichotomies are only illusory and future science will demonstrate the natural continuities that unite those seeming opposites, telling an all-encompassing narrative. In that case, life would occupy a chapter, or perhaps only a footnote in that theory of everything.

As it currently stands, though, the discontinuities are real and profound. It’s not just that personhood seems to negate the wilderness, but that nature generally negates itself out of sheer wildness. Nature creates and destroys its parts, and if the destruction has any larger function, it’s to make room for the emergence of novel constructs. People, too, are profoundly creative and destructive, so we may be avatars of nature’s wild indifference to its absurd work.

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One of the memes you hear in the old rhetorical war between so-called theists and atheists is that the other side has a larger death toll, so theirs is the more dangerous ideology. Which has killed more people, religion or secularism?

The battle over death counts

The apologist James W. Miller addressed this issue in “Atheists Have Killed More Than Religious People, Full Stop.” As you can tell from the title, he says he’s tired of the atheist trope that the Crusades, Inquisitions, pogroms, religious conquests, and so forth show that religion is the greatest threat to society.

On the contrary, he says, the twentieth-century record is that secular authoritarianism in Marxist regimes has killed far more people than the ancient religions:

Under Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union killed an estimated 20 million people through purges, forced labor camps, famine policies, and executions (Conquest, The Great Terror; Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism). Mao Zedong’s rule in China resulted in the deaths of roughly 45 million people, largely through the Great Leap Forward and political purges (Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine). The Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot killed around 1.7 to 2 million people in Cambodia, nearly a quarter of the population (Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime).

Moreover, “These were not regimes that merely happened to be atheist. They were regimes that often treated religion as an enemy to be eliminated. Churches were destroyed and clergy were imprisoned or executed. Faith itself was seen as a rival authority that had to be crushed.”

By comparison, the scale of religious killings in the ancient or medieval period is paltry:

The Crusades, often cited as the definitive case of religious violence, resulted in an estimated 1 to 3 million deaths over several centuries (Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A History). That is tragic, but it’s not remotely comparable to the industrialized killing of the twentieth century.

The Salem witch trials, frequently used as a symbol of religious hysteria, resulted in about 20 to 25 executions (Boyer and Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed). The number is small enough to fit inside a single room.

In any event, Miller says human nature is to blame for wars and political killings, and ruthless leaders typically only misuse religions to rally people around a secular flag or cause, such as the capture of land or the elimination of foreigners. “If a ruler invokes God to expand territory or consolidate power,” he says, “the motive is not faith. It’s ambition. The religious language is a tool, not the engine.”

Also, he says, religions aren’t equally liable to be misused in that way. Christianity and Islam have very different moral cores.

Christianity, at its core, does not teach conquest. Jesus taught his followers to love their neighbors, their enemies, and the stranger on the other side of the world. He rejected retaliation. He refused political power. He submitted to execution rather than overthrowing his oppressors.

When atrocities are committed in the name of Christianity, they occur precisely where these teachings are ignored. The further one moves from the ethical center of the faith, the easier it becomes to justify violence.

By contrast, Islam “incorporates a stronger framework of reciprocal justice within its legal and moral tradition. This does not make it uniquely violent, but it does make it different.”

The upshot is that

Religion, and Christianity in particular, has been a remarkable curb on the animal instincts of the human race. Removing that muzzle just lets a wild dog loose.

When belief in God disappears, it’s often replaced by something else that demands ultimate loyalty. The State. This substitute can become far more dangerous because it lacks any higher authority to restrain them.

What the atheist needs to reckon with, Miller says, is that “If anything, the ongoing habit of dismissing religion as inherently harmful is a far greater risk, pushing society toward a thinner moral framework, one that is less capable of restraining power and that is thus more vulnerable to the very atrocities it claims to prevent.”

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The deeper problem of tribalism

Now, the comparison of body counts isn’t just unseemly since it’s also quite the red herring. Perhaps propagandists for atheism have overplayed this card, or they’ve been misled by their adherence to scientific quantification, as if the quantity of deaths were the key point in a criticism of religion.

The record is liable to be overblown on both sides, especially when the goal is to associate all religious or nonreligious people with mass murderers. Obviously, just because a murderous regime has an ideology doesn’t mean all the deaths it causes are ideological. Miller himself points out that some of the Soviet deaths resulted from “famine policies.” So that had nothing to do with atheism directly, but with misguided faith in the economic system of communism that failed to support large populations with food. Indeed, if communism is to blame, we might blame early Christianity for practicing and popularizing similar socialist principles.

Also, the religious death tolls were demonstrations of the harm that could befall you if your mind got out of line. A theocracy persecutes its subjects for ideological deviations, so the religious harassment, torture, and killing were means of enforcing totalitarian control over everyone’s minds, including those who weren’t punished.

More importantly, the lopsided death tolls are largely due to the downside of secular progress. Clearly, modern secular societies have used scientific knowledge to design and build more effective weapons. If ancient theocracies were less enthralled to stultifying dogmas and prejudices, and were open-minded enough to develop the technological applications of rigorous science, they might have used guns, bombs, and missiles for tribal religious purposes, and committed genocide against foreign theocracies.

Then again, that very open-mindedness would have conflicted with religious dogmatism. So the trade-off is between the religious small-mindedness that impoverishes the masses in feudal, low-tech dictatorships, and the open-mindedness that presents us with godlike powers of creation and destruction that improve our living standards but also endanger us with weapons of mass destruction.

Miller is correct that religion itself isn’t the source of all human violence, although I assume no atheist has ever said otherwise. Tribalism is the more likely culprit, and tribalism is found even in chimpanzees. Troops of chimpanzees will war against each other, fighting over choice territory. Wild animals are often violent for basic evolutionary reasons: when resources are scarce, animals must compete for mates, food, and territory.

Yet religion isn’t exactly a neutral tool that is only ever misused when violence is done in religion’s name. Religion fits tribalism like a hand in a glove. The theologies of organized religions — which is to say popular, workable ones — typically demonize those who reject them.

Think of a band of chimpanzees that believes fervently in its right to exist because the members are driven by biological drives for self-preservation. Now imagine the band had the cultural ability to signal its rights not just with hoots, hollers, and hand gestures, but elaborate religious symbols that stir religious ecstasy, fear of death, and longing for immortality. What greater genocidal wars would chimpanzees perpetrate if their minds were opened to religious exacerbations of tribal self-aggrandizement and xenophobia?

Secular humanist morality

The chief advantage of modern secularism is that science supports a humanist ethos that opposes tribalism. Philosophical reflection on science shows us that our commonalities, such as our brain structures, genetic code, and existential condition of being people born into an impersonal cosmos, outweigh our petty differences.

At this point, the apologist will allege that while secular reason can inform us about our nature, it can’t justify moral values, so secularism is consistent with mass slaughter because genuine naturalists will be nihilists. People may have the commonality of cerebral cortexes, but they don’t thereby have any right to live. Hence, there should be nothing wrong with killing people.

That’s a tedious argument I’ve dealt with elsewhere. There are indeed serious meta-ethical issues with grounding a noble basis of morality, but theism provides only illusory solutions. Telling asinine miracle stories and theological fantasies that promote magical thinking can only trick us into accepting an unrealistic estimation of our value.

No, the better approach is to reckon with natural reality without succumbing to cheap, self-serving delusions. Social cooperation is instinctive in many animal species, but morality for people who’ve outgrown some of those instincts, or who are equipped with rational veto powers, must motivate us with inspiring narratives that do justice to the facts as they’re responsibly understood. Theistic religions may have motivated the ancient world, but in the twenty-first century, they’re outdated. A better story is the philosophy consisting of existential, cosmicist, humanistic, and pragmatic elaborations on naturalism.

Granted, the mere potential for progress doesn’t guarantee success. The secular humanist ethos didn’t prevent the emergence of bloodthirsty secular authoritarian regimes in the twentieth century. Indeed, there’s no guarantee that modern educated people will learn how to live in peace and prosperity over the long term without the aid of theistic delusions. Those delusions kept the civilized experiment going for millennia, whereas the explicit rejection of theistic rationales at the state level has been with us for only several centuries.

The New Atheist movement was dubious not just because of its unsustainable positivism, nurtured in the science departments that trained many of the movement’s leaders, but because this movement papered over the existential issues that naturalism raises.

Instead, New Atheism apologized for neoliberal consumerism. You saw this in the UK’s atheist bus slogan, “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” And you saw this in Sam Harris’s defense of the liberal status quo (that let structural problems fester in the developing world and rural parts of the US, resulting in the Trumpian populist backlash), and in Neil deGrasse Tyson’s repudiation of philosophy for not being as useful as science.

What the politically compromised leaders of the New Atheist movement failed to realize is what the older, existential atheists understood: the death of God is bound to be a subversive event. New Atheists railed against fundamentalist Christians and Muslims, but they wanted to oppose the prospect of a neomedieval theocracy with the bounties of a progressive secular society. Instead of scrutinizing the sustainability of that progress, they ended up apologizing for the mismatch between capitalism and the other liberal institutions, including democracy and science. Capitalism is the cuckoo bird in the nest of Western modernity.

What atheism does is confront us with our existential condition. We’re enlightened enough to realize we’re alone and godless, so we must produce a way of life that does justice to that condition. Everyone is in that position, including religious folks who don’t realize it. They’re not God-given spirits, but evolved animal bodies that bootstrapped their self-awareness, intelligence, imagination, sociality, and ambition with linguistic and cultural symbols, freeing themselves largely from natural selection. What type of civilization is best for such relatively awakened mammals?

If theism should figure in an existentially authentic civilization, it should do so only as art, as a fiction we tell alongside countless other stories to enrich our lives. The notion that we should bow before a special, obviously absurd narrative perished with God when early modern Europeans realized they should be open-minded enough to search for cultural alternatives to improve their social conditions, to extricate themselves from the worst aspects of what would later be called medievalism.

The red herring of the Jesus cult

Evidently, the threat of cultish authoritarianism remains with us in the twenty-first century, despite the victories against fascism in the Second World War and the collapse of Soviet communism. The rise of Trumpism shows what the ancient Greek thinkers knew: that demagogues are liable to sabotage democracies by using effective (sophistical) rhetoric to exploit the issues of the day, stirring up resentments, and gathering a cult of personality to take and abuse political power.

The humanist response to this is straightforward: strengthen the liberal society’s checks and balances, including the education system to instill critical thinking skills, and redistribute the wealth that capitalism produces, to prevent neofeudal inequalities that stoke resentment, the call for a strongman leader, and the regression to tribal scapegoating and barbarism.

But what’s the religious solution? Let’s follow Miller’s advice and be specific, taking Christianity as an example. Miller points out that the early Jesus movement was pacifistic and egalitarian for believers. (Brothers in Christ were viewed as equal, but God would still separate the sheep from the goats at the end of time, making for an eternal inequality.)

Still, it’s no accident that the organized religion of Christianity compromised on those absolutist convictions. The word “organized” in “organized religion” is a euphemism since the difference here is between a cult and a politically empowered, sustainable institution.

If you read between the lines, Jesus’s point in the Gospels was that godly morality is unearthly. Humans can’t achieve the kingdom of God without God doing all the work. Thus, Augustine said we must make do with the City of Man before God deigns to usher in his final judgment and replace human labour with the divine kind. We should expect Christendom to deviate from Jesus’s morals because the Church must operate in the fallen, demon-ridden realm of nature.

From a Christian standpoint, then, Paul’s theology of the Christ of faith supersedes the historical Jesus’s countercultural absolutism. This is why Paul’s epistles come after the Gospel narratives in the New Testament, even though the epistles were written earlier.

But the point is that Miller begs the question when he speaks of the early Jesus cult as Christianity’s moral “core.” The cult may have preceded the organized Church, but Christianity has been politically compromised for some seventeen hundred years, since the Roman Empire adopted the cult and merged it with imperial dynamics.

Consequently, we can hardly expect viable meta-ethical answers from established, politically and economically compromised Christianity.

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My third music album, Strata, is now out on YouTube. As with the other two collections of songs, “Algos in the Cave” and “Vagaries of Deep Time,” I wrote all the lyrics, and Suno, an AI platform, set the poems to music.

Strata:

Something that’s become clear to me in co-producing these 32 songs is the enormous contrast between what feels important when you’re using tools to explore your artistic ideas, and what others are likely to deem important in the marketplace. Indeed, much art seems masturbatory, as the artist indulges himself or herself, and others either will or won’t find any meaning in the results.

That’s even more likely to be true in the case of AI-generated art. In my view, art that’s purely AI-generated, with little or no human input, is likely to be slop until the large language model or AI content-generator becomes a genuine artificial general intelligence or nonhuman person. If that ever happens, content that’s purely AI-created would be subject to the AGI’s neoshamanic incentive to explore itself with artistic expressions. Humans would have little to do with it, and we’d all be spectators.

In the case of my albums, I write the lyrics and steer and curate the music that Suno produces. Some commenters have pointed out that many music enthusiasts still aren’t likely to be interested in the output.

Partly, this is because there’s a stigma on AI and Big Tech companies, and that’s for good reasons. Those companies are essentially stealing, profiting enormously off of the human-produced content on which the LLMs train, without compensating the rest of us for supplying those seeds. Moreover, there’s little plan for dealing with the economic fallout if AIs take most of our jobs. So if you use AI tools to produce art, you’re guilty by association.

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Then there’s the problem of overproduction or slop. When supply outmatches the demand, because anyone can be an “artist” now with AI tools, the supply’s value drops. We have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to the sea of content. Why take a chance on an unknown person’s artistic expressions when you could be bingeing your favourite content, streamed just next door on the internet?

Still, whatever low value most music consumers are like to place on Suno-generated music, the fact is that my albums are highly meaningful to me, and not just because they’re my brainchildren. Judging with as much neutrality as I can muster, these songs sound to me better than much of what I hear on the radio.

Of course, judging music is largely a matter of taste, but I’m saying that most music in the same genres that I explore lacks the same gravitas because the words aren’t as philosophically meaningful. Again, that’s largely a matter of taste, and obviously I’m biased because I wrote those lyrics: they’re meaningful to me because they express my views, the ones I’ve been working on for decades in my philosophical writing. And everyone’s free to have different interests. Moreover, reason may have little if anything to do with our evaluation of art.

This duality itself may be telling. It’s frequently said that the moment of anticipation can outweigh the culmination. Indeed, the time when I’m the only one who has heard the songs, before I’ve uploaded them to YouTube, is precious and eerie. All artists must have a similar experience, including the superstars.

The superstars know that their millions of fans will fawn over their work, regardless of its quality, but there’s a prior stage when the work’s pure, neoshamanic importance comes to the fore. In that initial stage, before the work is released to the general public, only a handful of people may have heard, seen, or read the work. They may marvel at it, or the work may mean something to them because they laboured over it, and the art gratifies their unconscious preoccupations.

Even the artists who have few if any admirers likely have a similar experience. True, they won’t experience the superstar’s fortune of being in the catbird seat. On the contrary, the unpopular artist knows he or she will likely be disappointed by the potential audience’s response. This is exacerbated by the fact that AI platforms like Suno produce polished work that sounds roughly as good as popular music. So the difference in interest feels discriminatory.

Again, that only deepens the dichotomy between art’s neoshamanic purpose and its capitalist role. Of course, these songs of mine are often only musical renditions of ideas I’ve worked out in articles, and an AI platform generated the music itself, so I can hardly expect much public enthusiasm about these songs.

Nevertheless, the songs are important to me. Moreover, they seem at least as compelling as much popular music, and if you appreciate my writing on Medium or Substack, you’ll likely welcome the songs’ ideas and messages, depending on your taste in musical genre.

As AI content-generators proliferate, we’ll likely have to learn to live with this contrast between private and public evaluations. Artistic greatness will become both nearer and further from most of us.

Strata:

Vagaries of Deep Time:

Algos in the Cave:

Religion has long been regarded as necessary for sustaining people’s moral convictions and uniting large societies.

George Washington said in his Farewell Address, “Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”

This predates by almost a century Fyodor Dostoevsky’s notorious remark, in The Brothers Karamazov, that “if you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up. Moreover, nothing then would be immoral, everything would be lawful, even cannibalism.”

Similarly, in Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville said, “The main business of religions is to purify, control, and restrain that excessive and exclusive taste for well-being which men acquire in times of equality.”

This alludes to the root meaning of “religion,” which is to bind or tie back, from the Latin “ligare,” as in a ligature or a filament that binds the skin and covers over a wound in surgery. This original sense is that religion is needed to civilize us, lest we revert to wild, tribal impulses and act like savages. Religions proclaim that inescapable supernatural powers watch everything we do, so we should abide by the law and our conscience.

The Bible itself encourages this dismissal of doubts about religion. According to Psalm 53:1, ‘The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.” They are corrupt, doing abominable iniquity; there is none that does good.’

But is religion still needed? Indeed, is there a pragmatic case for atheism that supersedes that old conservative defense of religion?

Ancient religious bonds

Theistic religion, meaning the kind that affirms the soul’s immortality and a miraculous personal lawgiver who assigns us a cosmic destiny, may once have been needed to sustain the civilized order. That order was hardly impeccable since slavery, patriarchy, imperialism, theocracy, and tribal wars were rampant. But assuming we think that for people, civilization is better than animal life in the wild, we might concede that religion was like the scaffolding that’s instrumental in a large construction project.

What the ancients lacked, though, was an independent basis for progress. Religion offered a mythos that branded the civilized endeavour. Theism includes a supernatural cast of characters and a spiritual plot that assigns folks salutary roles in society. The gods blessed the civilized order, including the wars and the inequality between castes. Indeed, the gods themselves were mascots for civilized norms, since they, too, warred and split into dominance hierarchies.

With much hindsight, we might liken that mythos to the so-called big lie, as in the one Adolf Hitler made infamous in Mein Kampf, in which he said, “The great masses of the people…will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.”

The big liar’s reasoning isn’t hard to puzzle out, since when someone lies brazenly, this liar exploits people’s sense of decorum. To suspect that someone would stoop to such a reckless feat of gaslighting would amount to the dire realization that insane or evil individuals may be loosed even in polite society. We prefer to give the liar the benefit of the doubt to stave off that fear. After all, we want to feel comfortable in our normal operations, rather than alienated from basic social conceits, and mistrustful of everyone we meet.

In any case, as I said, while civil society may once have depended on the big, Hitlerian lie or, to use the euphemism, the “faith in traditional myths” about gods, miracles, magically inspired scriptures, religious authorities, and a transcendent role for humankind, it turns out that there’s another way to ground civility. This is the way that characterized the overcoming of European medievalism with global-caliber modernity, the kind that sustains objective rather than just culturally relative progress.

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The rise of modern humanism

Science was crucial to the new faith that we could solve our problems without kidding ourselves by praying to gods or sacrificing virgins or livestock to priests. Scientists discovered the truth about our position in nature, and science in turn rested on quasi-Gnostic alienation that built on pre-Christian secular humanism in the Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer’s Odyssey, and Jewish satire (the implicit repudiation of theism in Ecclesiastes and Job, and in the monotheistic conversion of God into a “transcendent” irrelevancy).

That humanism gave us individualism, the conviction that all people are precious, regardless of their sex, age, wealth, creed, or skin color. Humanism, in turn, grounded capitalism, democracy, and laws that enshrined the principle that people should be free to think for themselves, not just in private but in public.

Here, then, is a nonreligious way of motivating civility. Science provides overwhelming evidence for philosophical naturalism (the view that everything is fundamentally natural, so there are no miracles in a metaphysical sense), and humanism responds to that existential condition with pride in the human ability to progress with reason, imagination, and empathy.

In the early modern period, holdovers from the medieval outlook could still have dismissed this “liberalism,” deeming it blasphemous, insolent, and foolish.

Thus, in his Essay on the Generative Principles of Political Constitutions (1809), Joseph de Maistre said, “Man is a free, intelligent, and noble being: without doubt; but he is not less an instrument of God.” Indeed, “since every constitution is divine in its principle, it follows, that man can do nothing in this way, unless he reposes himself upon God, whose instrument he then becomes.” In a footnote, he adds, “We may even generalize the assertion, and pronounce without exception, that no institution, whatsoever, can endure, if it is not founded on religion.”

Or in railing against the French Revolution, in Considerations on France (1796), Maistre said, “Orderly government excludes an infinity of schemes, but under the rule of a false sovereignty there is no end of chimerical plots. All passions are unchained and every hope is licensed.”

A couple of centuries later, this reads like projection. It’s theistic lunacy that licenses “an infinity of schemes,” providing a “false sovereignty” and “no end of chimerical plots” needed to shore up the childish, ludicrous presumption that the universe’s source cares about human politics or sexual habits.

Granted, that mockery of the Church’s counterrevolution depends on the naturalistic, humanistic outlook that early modernity established, but that’s the point. Once civilization gained an independent foundation on science, capitalism, democracy, and other liberal institutions, we’re poised to wonder whether we still need theistic narratives to make us civil and moral. Wouldn’t a solid humanist education in the sciences and arts suffice?

More than that, we can afford to call attention to the harms that religion causes or exacerbates since there’s another game in town. We can point out that the emperor is naked since we don’t need emperors anymore.

For instance, we can observe that naturalistic humanism would be superior to theistic religion in binding societies since the former explicitly establishes a biologically human nature, whereas religions tend to be tribal. Christianity binds Christians, not Christians with Muslims and Hindus. Also, religions divide themselves according to purity tests, so religions give us schisms, religious wars, patriarchal rule over women, and theological excuses for everything from torture and slavery to feudalism and the worst excesses of capitalism.

Comparing religious and secular cultures

At this point, the proponent of religion may insist that if naturalism is true, there’s no basis for a humanist evaluation of people’s merits. Humanism couldn’t unite anyone since this secular value system would be vacuous. What you need for the assertion of a moral direction or a grand purpose is the magic of a divine commandment or the mystique that only theology can provide.

Of course, that appeal to magic and mystery only obfuscates the problem of how moral claims should be justified. Religion offers mere pseudo-explanations and hand-waving defenses of authoritarian prejudices. If you want to understand how morality could be possible, or what would justify morality in the modern condition of rational enlightenment (about our scientifically established position as clever mammals in a natural cosmos), you could hardly be content with ancient myths or theology.

I’ve discussed this in more detail elsewhere, so I’ll just point out here that humanism at least has the merit of addressing head-on our existential condition, whereas the theistic account of morality settles for a happy-talking fantasy that personifies nature’s staggering inhumanity.

Secular humanism responds to the truth of naturalism, to the fact that we evolved as animals eking out a living despite the solar system’s neutrality to our welfare. Humanism is a heroic, epic reply to the void, based on the conviction that people are special in the animal kingdom. Religions frequently demonize this pride, even as modern civilized progress has demonstrated that while this secular heroism may end up being tragically misplaced, it’s hardly groundless or absurd.

Scientific, capitalistic, democratic, and free-thinking advances proved the validity of humanist concepts, so there can be no more counterrevolutionary, religious bigotry against atheistic “blasphemies.” Even if world-historic modernity ends up sabotaging our species, as our progress demolishes the biosphere, there would be no intellectually responsible way for religious apologists to maintain that secular progress was impossible all along.

At some point in debating this question of the respective utilities of theistic religion and naturalistic humanism, we might be inclined to draw up a list of which side has committed the most or the worst atrocities. Of course, it’s a mixed bag in either case. Ancient religions have been oppressive rationalizations of authoritarian and tribal impulses that sustained civilizations, but only by making those societies grossly unjust for most of the inhabitants. Modernity has given us progress, but also the world wars, weapons of mass destruction, existential alienation, and the attendant mental illnesses and ironic neofeudal social arrangements that are only superficially progressive.

But neither worldview must be flawless for the other to be obsolete. The question isn’t whether theistic religion is evil and secular humanism makes us all saints. Instead, it’s whether this kind of religion is no longer socially necessary, or whether this mode of propping up civility is counterproductive in developed societies in the twenty-first century.

What do those religions add to science, capitalism, democracy, and the free-thinking arts that’s needed for our social welfare? Doesn’t religious faith clash with the implicit humanist ethos that supports those progressive institutions? Don’t modern religious folks make fools of themselves when they vote or buy high-tech products one moment and pray to a messiah or guru the next?

Allegedly, ‘The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.”’ But couldn’t we just as easily say, ‘The fool says hypocritically, “There is a God,” while adopting a thoroughly godless lifestyle’?

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Being a Christian in the twenty-first century should feel strange for lots of reasons.

Just like in the ancient world, there are many other religions, but modern globalization happens to bring them all to the Christian’s attention on the internet or in the schoolroom.

So, whereas the ancients had more of an excuse for their tribal disregard of opposing cultures, late-modern Christians are left in the lurch. Their religion is explicitly exclusive in that it tells them that the only way to win out in the end is to be Christian. All the other religions and secular cultures in the world are supposed to be deeply flawed, if not active demonic traps.

Yet late-modern Christians are largely influenced by the founding principles of developed societies, which are those of liberalism or humanism. Whereas in most ancient societies, the law was regarded as the whim of some monarch who stood in for the leader of a society of deities, late-modern Christians are beneficiaries of the secular realization that human laws emerge from our natural plight.

To put it briefly, we use reason and familial empathy to extract ourselves from the war of all against all in the wilderness, so we band together and learn to compromise to keep the peace and to benefit from the group’s greater power to help us all get what we want in life.

Thus, Christians are under some pressure to tolerate other religions, which is to say that modern Christianity is implicitly liberal simply because it exists in modernized societies or in the developing world that aspires to be modern. By “modern,” I mean the reckoning with the relatively recent revolutions and institutions of science, capitalism, democracy, and the free-thinking arts.

So what’s a Christian to do? How to reconcile Christianity’s ancient tribalism, xenophobia, and cultish impudence and resentment with the modern logic of liberal tolerance?

A Christian rationale for the many religions

James W. Miller, who holds degrees from U.C. Berkeley, the University of Edinburgh, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Fuller Theological Seminary, has written about this problem in Jesus Among the Gods.

There, he arrives at a balanced solution. On the one hand, he says, Christians are commanded to love their neighbour. On the other, Christians should remember that “some religious doctrines are evil.” Moreover, “people are religious by nature, and we are naturally inclined to guess at our origin story. That in and of itself is not evil. That’s natural.”

Miller thus attempts to turn the theistic problem of the multiplicity of religions against the atheist. The many religions that our species produces are supposed to be evidence for theism, since if God exists, we’d naturally be inclined to search for him.

In Miller’s words,

The variety of religions actually works in the Christian’s favor rather than the skeptic’s. They actually give rise to a form of wonder, which any pastor should be grateful for. I would be much more likely to suspect that a species created by God would be brimming with expectations for Him, whereas if there were no God, I would not at all be surprised to find the world populated by irreligious animals. As it stands, in every era and culture throughout time, most of us have looked up at the stars and sensed the work of an Artist. Creation can’t stop looking for its Creator. It’s like God has prepared us for the real thing.

The natural source of many religions

This reversal of expectations shouldn’t be surprising. Just as there are a large number of religions, there are a great many theistic arguments. The obvious reason for this is that theology is like playing tennis without a net. There are no rules, nothing in religion is properly testable or rigorously tentative, and the myths and creeds are as loose as poems.

Notice that a poet can adapt his or her creativity to any setting. Poetry is like a filter through which anything can pass, whereupon it’s immortalized in verse. Similarly, the urge to worship something, or to arrive at easy, flattering answers to life’s most challenging questions, can readily accommodate any set of circumstances, no matter how they might seem to undermine a faith or ritual. You just adjust your style of play, like a creative child who tires of one game and easily invents another.

But if we look at Miller’s assertions from a more neutral vantage point, we’re likely to notice the flaws of his turnabout. Is it true that in a godless universe, there would probably be no religions? Think it through for a moment.

Assuming life nevertheless evolves because nature itself is creative, organisms would have to develop ways of coping with this godlessness, or with their environment’s wild neutrality towards their welfare. These coping mechanisms should be familiar since they’re just the traits that distinguish animal species, such as claws, fins, and wings. Another familiar trait is intelligence, which enables a species to adapt to any niche by modeling options for flourishing in it with compensatory tools, structures, vehicles, and the like.

But just as some animals may overextend themselves in their adaptation to a lifestyle, such as the giraffe that’s used to eating from tall trees and must carry around a long neck, highly intelligent animals may endanger themselves by getting caught up in their imagination. Internally, we live in a sea of abstractions, models, and fictions. We rely on our concepts that simplify real patterns, so we’re tempted to mistake the map for the territory. To plan and gain some tactical advantage, we fixate on modeled possibilities and even counterfactual scenarios, so we’re liable to take actual circumstances for granted.

This is the psychological basis of theological speculation. In a godless universe, intelligent animals might arrive at the idea of gods by imagining possible versions of themselves. Just as tribal mammals have leaders who are stronger, faster, or more popular or ruthless than the other members, we can imagine the ultimate person, just as we can imagine the purest, ultimate tiger, snake, or bird. Our concepts naturally idealize because they simplify what they categorize, ignoring troubling complexities, so the models can fit in our limited mental bandwidth.

We’d begin by imagining that all natural processes are divinely animated since the root causes of natural order are mysterious and remote from our senses. Then we’d imagine immortal versions of us specifically, such as the versions that seem to survive in our memories when we grieve our dead ancestors. We imagine that their “spirits” live on, as they seem to do in our dreams, memories, or shamanic trances. Then we’d reify our social structures, distinguishing between high and low gods to suit the differences between the socially evolved classes of people.

Eventually, we’d exaggerate and reify our self-image, arriving at the notion of a super-duper person, and we’d do this as a side-effect of surviving and flourishing with the traits with which wild, impersonal nature equipped us. There would end up being many religions that worship gods because we’re inherently self-absorbed and egoistic, trusting our imagination’s models, and using personification or mental projection as a shortcut to understanding the world and reassuring ourselves.

Of course, this hypothetical development should be familiar, too, since it’s roughly the actual development in the history of religion, proceeding from animism and shamanism, through ancestor worship and polytheism, to monotheism.

Thus, Miller’s assumption about the unlikelihood of inventing the concept of gods in a godless universe is dubious. His assumption indicates more a failure of theistic imagination than a real improbability.

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The improbability of theistic stories

What of the other half of Miller’s point, that the multiplicity of religions helps confirm that religious folks are on the right track, since if God exists, “we’d naturally be inclined to search for him”?

The trouble with that isn’t hard to discern either. What Miller does here is skip over the classic problem of evil, and more specifically, the problem of God’s hiddenness from the world. If God existed, why would his creatures have to search for him in the first place? Why would God hide from everyone else? What kind of loving deity is this?

No, Miller’s scenario isn’t so intuitive after all. Sure, if God exists, he could hide for some reason, and he could implant a desire in some of his creatures so they’d look for him. Maybe God is testing us, or maybe he’s coy or protecting us by giving us some autonomy. Or maybe God is cruel or doesn’t care about us, and he’s busy creating many worlds because he just likes to create and toy with his handiworks.

Again, it’s tennis without a net. The theist can tell any just-so story he or she likes. None of them is testable or falsifiable since none is a rationally responsible proposition. These theological possibilities are just poetic expressions of ignorance and existential longing. Theists can make it up as they go because they’re only perpetuating a fiction. Even if the myth or creed turns out to be true, the religious narrative works like a fictional story, not a scientific theory or philosophical conjecture. Reason has very little inherently to do with theology or religiosity.

To quote the glorious speech on religion from the television show Mr. Robot, “All religions are just metastasizing mind worms, meant to divide us so it’s easier to rule us by the charlatans that wanna run us. All we are to them are paying fanboys of their poorly-written sci-fi franchise.”

In any case, sure, maybe there are lots of religions because we’re all searching for God, and God arranged things that way. He hid himself and built us so we’d nevertheless long to find our Maker. To quote Bob Ross, “maybe, maybe, maybe.”

Still, a possibility isn’t automatically probable. If we’re looking at things at least halfway rationally, we need to distinguish between far-fetched and likely possibilities. Again, what kind of God would arrange things this way, hiding and forcing us to come and find him? Is that a deity we should want to find?

The aesthetic evaluation of worldviews

This is the important question to ask here, and notice that it’s aesthetic. After all, while we’re free to make up stories, once a story is told, a critic is free to examine the story’s worth by checking whether its assumptions and plot points are coherent or relevant to our current problems or level of knowledge.

The Christian spins a narrative about why there are so many religions, just as the writers of Genesis wrote a fanciful myth about how the universe was made. A guy made everything in six days and then rested because who wouldn’t after so much hard work.

But once the Christian’s speculation is on the table, we’re free to evaluate the story’s implications. So humans search for God by producing a welter of conflicting religions, and God wants it that way because he’s supposedly omnipresent but also an expert hider who pops up only seldom, surprising the dickens out of prophets and saints.

Some such scenario is as possible as any far-fetched fiction. But is it a good story? Is it still good enough to live by in the twenty-first century? Is a religion that takes that story seriously liable to sustain itself without resorting to a host of underhanded ploys, such as the indoctrination of children or the resort to casuistic sophistry, not to mention the conquest of opposing societies and the stretching of theology to accommodate every possible vice and misdeed?

Is the protagonist of this narrative — a wily God who conceals himself to such an extent that it looks as though he doesn’t exist at all — worthy of our reverence?

Perhaps the Christian should return to the older, Jewish recommendation that we should fear such a God, not love him as though he were our doting parent. Christians turned to such a polytheistic device because of the Hellenistic themes running through their religion’s formative period. Christianity began as a Jewish version of the Hellenistic mystery cults that were popular leading up to the first century CE. So Jesus was elevated to a divine status, which made for a multiplicity of gods, and to attract adherents, the relation between them had to be positive. Thus, to emulate the Father and Son, Christians had to be loving too.

But does that traditional narrative work with the need to posit God’s shyness when confronting the multiplicity of religions, and more broadly, the prominence of evil in the form of unjust suffering? That’s far from clear. Of course, we judge likelihoods according to our background knowledge and formative experience, and because Christians are playing tennis without a net, they can stretch their beliefs to overcome apparent inconsistencies. They can harmonize their worldview to avoid cognitive dissonance.

We all do this, but that doesn’t mean that all worldviews are equally meritorious in all time periods and circumstances. Some stories get outdated, so the labour of having to patch up the narrative to cover up its shortcomings becomes increasingly onerous. At some point, the Christian may come to think the trouble isn’t worth it, or he or she quietly quits the religion, going through the motions without caring about the core myth or taking much practical inspiration from it.

Why are there so many religions? It’s because our species survives mainly thanks to our intelligence and imagination, so we tell a great many stories and fixate on them in our cultural playtime. Specifically, because we evolved from wild primates, we’re inherently vain and tribal, so we readily presume we’re crucial to everything else, and we project our idea of personhood onto all causes in nature.

Alternatively, it’s because God exists, but he arranges things so we could be forgiven for thinking he doesn’t exist after all: he systematically hides from us but torments us by implanting in us a desire to find and to know our creator, yet this deity is also supposed to be loving and merciful like Jesus, and he wants to have a personal relationship with us.

Which scenario is simpler and more intuitive? Which makes the most sense from a twenty-first-century standpoint? Those questions should be rhetorical.

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I once worked in an office that was being renovated, and I worked closely with the office building’s Muslim handyman who had immigrated to Canada from Arabia. We got on well because he had an excellent work ethic and an admirable sense of honor that I imagined traced back to Islam’s Bedouin roots.

After all, there’s honor in a desert culture because the desert is a mortal enemy to living things, which is bound to afflict survivors with a mystical appreciation of the stakes in life. A desert is like an intrusion of outer space into the terrestrial paradise, taunting us with the universe’s average lethality.

But why was it easy for a secular Jew like me to befriend a Muslim in the workplace? Of course, we didn’t discuss religion or politics at work, and there are exceptions to every rule. But the rule in question is an imposing one: the antipathy between the Western monoculture and the Muslim world.

Indeed, the clash between the progressive, secular civilizations and the predominantly Muslim cultures in the Middle East and Northern Africa has been appalling ever since the Western powers leaped ahead economically, technologically, and culturally, and since they defeated the Ottoman Empire and carved up the Middle East in WWI.

Secular societies divide religion from politics and adopt scientific knowledge and the animal drivers of human nature, such as greed and selfishness, to fuel economic growth. Muslim countries are steeped in Bedouin desert culture, the Quran, and medieval interpretations of their religion, which don’t separate religion from the state.

Westerners scoff at what they regard as the Muslim world’s deeply naïve view of Islam. It’s as though Muslims in the Middle East have been caught in a time warp, so they’re unable to learn new things and grow with the rest of humanity. This isn’t just an abstract evaluation either, since the consequences of rampant Muslim fundamentalism are poverty, tyranny, and human rights abuses throughout the Muslim world.

Western powers have tried to manage the backward nature of those societies by engineering coups and installing puppet secular rulers to keep the oil supplies flowing and to modernize the Islamic cultures.

For their part, most Muslims in those regions resent so-called modern progress, deeming it comically sinful. Democracy and capitalism allow vices to flourish, and secularists infantilize themselves with a consumer culture that knows no wise balance, but threatens the biosphere and fails to acknowledge that the source of reality is great enough to humble anyone. Far from demonstrating enlightened humility, the so-called advanced countries are steeped in hubris and folly. The obscene rise of Trumpism makes the sinfulness of Western secularism transparent.

Secularists and moderate Muslims look for a bridge between the Western monoculture and medieval Islamism, a way for each to respect and come to terms with the other.

There is such a bridge, but it’s seldom acknowledged. The bridge is cosmic horror.

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Secular cosmic horror

The Romantic artists and thinkers, existential philosophers, and Lovecraftian writers of weird tales rejected the utilitarian, reductionist side of naturalism that emerged with the Industrial Revolution. These secular counter-revolutionaries emphasized the mystical aspect of nature and the smallness of human concerns. Far from being just a standing reserve, as Martin Heidegger called it, as in a bounty of raw materials for us to exploit, nature is a cosmic monstrosity that mocks and thwarts our vanity.

Secular humanists aim to use the revolutions of science and liberalism (capitalism, democracy, and freedom of the arts) to progress at nature’s expense. But science itself reveals the inhuman extent of the cosmos. Nature includes black holes that swallow spacetime, and a quantum underpinning that makes nonsense of our intuitive conception of physicality and local, mechanistic causality. Evolution operates on a deep timescale that dwarfs our mundane, human-centered standards of change.

In short, the Western outlook implies dark pantheism, a grotesque scientific understanding of nature that motivates what we call secular progress. We’re preoccupied with social advances only because we’re implicitly horrified by nature’s wildness, amorality, and alien (inhuman) dimensions.

The so-called First World, consisting of the societies that have “modernized” or adopted the revolutions of science and liberalism, has been coping with proto-Lovecraftian insights into our existential condition since the end of the eighteenth century.

Islamic cosmic horror

Now, what does this have to do with Islam?

Well, Western monotheism implies cosmic horror, too. I’ve argued this elsewhere, and you could go through the history of the three major monotheistic religions to see how they deal with Judaism’s implicit satire on polytheism. The problem for theists generally is that polytheism is the only obviously coherent form of theism, so it’s the only genuine theistic contender in the history of ideas. When you personify ultimate causes or sources of metaphysical productivity and order, you naturally apply our self-conceptions and homely intuitions about social propriety, resulting in the idea of a society of deities.

What the Jewish prophets did by proclaiming mystical monotheism was to build a religion on countercultural outrage on behalf of all oppressed peoples in the ancient world. Polytheism was deemed idolatrous and vain because the morality that emerged from the Axial Age (the middle of the first millennium BCE in India, China, Greece, and the Middle East) demanded less farcical and overt rationalizations of imperial injustice.

Might made right in kingdoms and empires throughout the ancient world, and the Jewish prophets echoed the ascetic, countercultural criticisms from Buddhist monks and Greek philosophers, in proclaiming that true divinity couldn’t be a mere reflection of human vices and political compromises. The divine power that created the Earth and the “heavens” had to transcend our parochial intuitions and habits. Hence, not just polytheism but theism itself, with its vain personifications, had to be wrongheaded.

Consequently, Jews ended up criticizing even the vestigial personal aspect of their Supreme Being. The Books of Job and Ecclesiastes repudiate the necessarily tyrannical inhumanity of any solitary, king-like deity. Thus, insofar as monotheism retains its theistic metaphors and dogmas, a monotheistic religion will entail cosmic horror that’s akin to HP Lovecraft’s tales of Cthulhu and the other hideous gods that he took to represent nature’s inhuman scale.

Christians missed or revolted against that Jewish lesson, and cast God as a loving being, using the Hellenistic image of a dying and rising saviour to moralize epic standards of heroism. The Christian God wasn’t an epic figure who slays monsters and glories in bloodshed and war, but a saintly, oppressed, wise man and healer who means to rescue humanity from our dire fate.

For Christians, God is love, or at least that’s this religion’s superficial, exoteric level of creedal meaning. Look a little deeper at the Christian theology of salvation, including the doctrine of hellfire, the absurdity of original sin, and the incoherence of the Incarnation and Trinity doctrines, and the proto-Lovecraftian horror that’s implicit in Jewish monotheism shines through even Christianity’s virtual polytheism.

In any case, Islam is supposed to be a return to the strictness of Jewish monotheism, except that Muslims mean to out-Judaize Jews in that respect. Alas, most Muslims miss the satirical point of Jewish monotheism because of the vast historical differences between the two groups. Jews developed their prophetic outlook from the standpoint of the conquered, whereas early Muslims found themselves as conquerors (much as Christians became conquerors as they inherited the Roman Empire in the fourth century).

So whereas Jews understood that monotheism ought to be anti-theological since the point was to satirize genuine, straightforward theism, namely polytheism, Muslims took monotheism literally. Instead of reverting to secular humanism with most modern Jews, Muslims emphatically retained the theistic aspect of their faith. Thus, Islam entails cosmic horror.

Indeed, Allah is a terrifying tyrant, a great being before whom we’re supposed to “submit” with every breath we take, word we utter, and deed we carry out. The Quran revels in threats of divine punishment for disobedience and demands absolute fealty from believers.

This kingly image of Allah is an appalling myth that shocks Muslims into an edifying trance. Muslims learn to be humble because they haunt themselves with their strict monotheistic religion. Incessantly, they read their Quran or virtual Necronomicon, absorbing the lesson that the Supreme Being is a nightmare before whom we all must grovel, abasing ourselves in prayer and ascetic surrender.

Here, then, is the cultural bridge between modernity and Islam. Here is what these civilizations share: a deep sense of cosmic horror. The two civilizations characterize the horror differently, one with scientific objectification and philosophical rumination, and the other with theology and political applications (dehumanizing, oppressive theocratic dictatorships).

Still, these two worlds ought to converse based on this shared understanding. They ought to reflect on this meeting of minds, this common fear that leads us all to desperate, rarely noble responses.

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