On existential angst & modern religion

We used to have frameworks for meaning & purpose; blueprints for How To Be that we could look towards for guidance on what to strive for and how best to live our lives. Although far from perfect, these frameworks provided us with stories, knowledge and identities that we could use to make sense of the world and our place in it. They equipped us with tools that we could use to navigate the inevitable chaos and suffering that seem to be built into the experience of life.

Here in the West, however, we seem to have left behind many of our previously cherished frameworks for meaning and purpose. Whether this was done with awareness and intentionality is certainly up for debate, but the results of the shift seem less debatable, as the absence of these frameworks appears to have left many of us forced to grapple with untenable amounts of existential angst and ultimately, nihilism. This observation is not a new one, as German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously declared in 1883:

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murders? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”

Despite not being a religious man himself, Nietzsche did not view the decline of Christianity in the face of The Enlightenment as a development that was necessarily positive. He was a rather fervent atheist, but his prophetic words reflected a concern about what it truly meant for Europe to abandon the moral framework upon which it had relied for centuries, and it wasn’t clear to him that good things laid ahead.

MORAL FRAMEWORKS

Religion is probably the most obvious example of what I will refer to as a moral framework, which can be thought of as a kind of mental technology that facilitates moral perception, emotional regulation, and protects against the psychological anxiety that often accompanies nihilistic thinking. It is certainly not the case that a human being cannot survive without a moral framework, but as I’ll later argue, trying to get by without one tends to make life more painful and burdensome than is desirable or necessary for most people.

There seem to be 3 primary components of a moral framework:

The Transcendent
The Moral Landscape
The Prescription

The Transcendent Refers to that which transcends all else, meaning that there is nothing above it or before it, and that it is intrinsically meaningful and valuable. Common examples include notions of God(s), The Universe, Truth, Mother Nature, “highest value(s),” etc.

The Moral Landscape Refers to the idea that human beings find themselves in a landscape of morally-weighted values (i.e. compassion, honor, loyalty, deceitfulness, jealously, etc.) Some values are to be aspired to and emulated while others are to be avoided.

The Prescription Refers to the explicit sets of rules and guidelines for how human beings should navigate The Moral Landscape and become more aligned with The Transcendent. Common examples include scriptures, fables, commandments, practices, etc.

HAVE WE LOST OUR MORAL FRAMEWORKS?

While many people in The West still identify with a particular religious tradition, I would argue that it is difficult for modern people to conceive of what it meant to be religious in say, 12th century Europe, during the Crusades (a nearly 200-year holy war). Religion has by no means disappeared, but it is almost impossible to overstate the degree to which it has been transformed in the last few centuries. Not only did The Church go from being the single most important institution in human life to becoming subordinate to the power of The State, but divine monarchies also went from being the dominant form of governance and social hierarchy to largely being replaced by various forms of democracy with clear separations between Church and State enshrined into their foundational value systems. The implications of these shifts will likely never be fully comprehended, but there are certainly some useful insights that can be gleaned from seeking to better understand these developments.

The declines in religious affiliation and church attendance both in the U.S. and Europe speak for themselves, however the “secularization” of The West is probably overstated and misunderstood. The ascendancy of “Enlightenment values” is often credited for these declines, but I want to argue that The Enlightenment is better understood as the ‘watering down of religion’ than as the ‘end of religion.’ It turns out the distention is actually quite important…

The Enlightenment

At its core, The Enlightenment was a philosophical shift that elevated ideas such as reason, scientific progress, and liberty to a level of fundamental importance. It was also a moment in history where people were at once forced to grapple with the the consequences of centuries of religious violence as well as with the beginnings of the first Industrial Revolution; two rather significant circumstances. Given that state of affairs, it was not at all obvious where society should go from there — Should Christianity be left behind? Can it co-exist with this new scientific way of understanding the world?

It was the philosophers and public intellectuals of the time who found themselves confronting these questions, and it is of critical importance to highlight that most of these thinkers were not atheists who believed that religion should be done away with entirely. By contrast, many of them were raised in deeply religious communities, received traditional religious educations, believed in some notion of God, and also believed that faith was an extremely important part of human life. Rather than devote their energy to the project of destroying religion, thinkers such as Immanuel Kant instead became principally concerned with finding a balance between the Judeo-Christian worldview and the emergent scientific worldview. This reconciliatory approach was thought by many to be more desirable and sustainable than disposing of religion in favor of science or disposing of science in favor of religion. The former was not ideal because even amongst the non-religious, there was a sense that it was dangerous for human beings to live without moral frameworks. Kant himself believed that even if God could not be empirically proven to exist, it would still be better for human beings to believe in God, because a world without God was a world without free will and morality.

“Morality leads, inevitably to religion, through which it extends over a moral Lawgiver.”

This is a profound idea in that grounds morality in something transcendent and makes sense of it as something that human beings can reason their way to but cannot create for themselves. It provides a universally accessible framework for moving through the world in a virtuous and ethical way; removing much of the ambiguity and uncertainty associated with worrying about how to live and how to carry oneself.

The latter was not ideal because it simply was not feasible within the context. The Enlightenment sharing a period of overlap with the first Industrial Revolution meant that remarkably rapid technological development was beginning to become a fact of life. As society became more visibly dependent upon industrial technologies, denial of the scientific worldview became increasingly untenable. From electric batteries, to steam engines, to cotton gins, one’s use of these tools was an implicit admission of belief in the scientific worldview.

The (Failure of) Reconciliation

To be clear, I don’t believe it’s the case that religion and science are intrinsically at odds. As Kant noted, empirical knowledge and faith are two entirely different domains of human thought and epistemology that serve entirely different purposes. Religion and science are only incompatible insofar as they fail to stay in their own lanes, meaning that religion is not for making empirical claims and science is not for making metaphysical claims.

I do, however, believe that Christianity was ultimately not able to survive the challenges and attempts at reconciliation that came out of The Enlightenment. It seems to me that in attempting to bring these two worldviews together, something fundamental was lost: mysticism.

So, what is mysticism?

Mysticism essentially refers to the idea that a person can become one with The Transcendent, but it also encompasses ideas about altered states of consciousness and experiences of spiritual truths and revealed insights. I tend to think of it as the more ‘spiritual’ component of religiosity. So perhaps unsurprisingly, many of The Enlightenment thinkers found belief in mysticism to be particularly problematic, and felt that if faith and Christianity were to remain as foundational elements of western society, a more “reasonable” and “rational” approach would be necessary. All the talk of miracles and revelation would need to be done away with, as it was these kinds baseless and unnecessary notions that inspired and motivated so much of the religious violence that had been plaguing Europe for hundreds of years. At best, mysticism was something that we could get by without, and at worst, it was something actually that perverted religious faith.

This is where things began to break down.

My argument that The Enlightenment was the ‘watering down’ of religion rather than ‘the end’ of religion is fundamentally about the trivialization of mysticism. It’s about the idea that all of the wisdom and morality that we derived from religion could be separated and extracted out from the mystical; the idea that we could have our cake and eat it too. We cannot. As Nietzsche so presciently put it:

“When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident… Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept of it, the faith in God, one break the whole.”

While there are certainly no shortage of gifts from the The Enlightenment to be thankful for, this to me, is probably it’s most consequential flaw. The benefit of hindsight allows us to see that rather than a reconciliation which lead to both worldviews existing in their fullest and most robust forms, what we got instead was a damaged and diluted version of a previously robust (albeit imperfect) moral framework. Kant, again, serves as an example of this, as he more-or-less ended up maintaining belief in God and in the importance of “moral religion,” but did not do so in a way that was entirely compatible with the Judeo-Christian understanding of God and religion. Spending his entire life contemplating faith, religion, rationality, reason and morality led Kant to very different beliefs and conclusions than the ones he started out with, and I would argue that this largely reflects the trend we have seen in The West. Fast-forward to present day, where as I noted above, we can see that many people still report as identifying as Christians. However the degree to which religion is more than a cultural affiliation, the degree to which people have and are formally educated in the texts and teachings of the religion, the degree to which people routinely engage with the practices and rituals of the religion, and maybe even the degree to which people actually derive their meaning, purpose and moral values from the religion have markedly declined. It’s almost as if religious fundamentalists, many of whom haven’t reformed or updated their beliefs for centuries, are the only ones who still fully engage with their faith and get everything out of it that it was meant to provide us with.

The problem doesn’t end there either.

What’s more is that the fundamental values of The Enlightenment are predicated on Judeo-Christian values. So not only have we attempted to pick and choose which aspects of Christianity we would adhere to, but in doing so, we have at once compromised our legacy moral framework and unwittingly undermined the core principles of this new philosophy as well. For example, let’s take democracy, one of the crown jewels of Western philosophical and political thought. The idea that the power to govern should be placed in the hands of the people is predicated on the notion of human beings as divine creatures who have been bestowed, by God, with unalienable rights, free will, and the ability to reason.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

These claims are not empirical claims, but rather testaments to faith and belief in something transcendent. So when we lose or even weaken our spiritual connection to that which is transcendent, we inevitably find ourselves trying to uphold values that have been untethered and ungrounded from that which gave them meaning and purpose in the first place. This I, believe, is what it means to lose one’s moral framework. Even as someone who has not identified with or practiced Christianity for over a decade, I view this development as problematic. To understand human beings is to understand the importance of moral frameworks, and whether its indigenous religions, Judaism or Scientology, human beings will always find their way to faith and religiosity. Even if they have to channel these impulses though non-traditional channels such as politics or sports. Some will find that their traditional religion provides them with all the moral and spiritual nourishment that they need, while even fewer will be able to get by without it. However, I would argue that neither of these approaches are scalable and sufficient for most.

For me, the fundamental question becomes…

How can we have a moral framework that:

Actually provides us with meaning & purpose while reducing our proclivities for nihilism and existential angst
Is able to evolve and be updated without being watered down
Can retain our rich cultural traditions of ancestral wisdom, spirituality and practices without becoming dogmatic and anachronistic

SO WHAT NOW?