Our minds’ lives are dominated by grand, lofty intellectual climate systems. Architectures of taken-for-granted thought that are our way of knowing that everything we can and can’t see or experience is in its right place, including ourselves. Filters that translate the music of universal chaos into harmonious signals of right and wrong, purpose and failure, covering all things. They are not neutral, but impersonal forces that apply equally to everyone, against which you can establish your merit, but that cannot have feelings about you. We all carry with us the sense that there is something larger than ourselves, universal forces that govern everything, pre-exist everything, and with which we cannot converse, like the laws of physics.
These are our ideas, systems, and institutions; things like “America” or “social justice” or “the state.” In aligning ourselves with these external governing realities, we experience a kind of broad, open sensation, that occasionally buzzes so much we experience it as strong intangibles like duty, justice, honor, righteousness, and other noble feelings.
Harari calls them religions. And I had always assumed that humans had always experienced whatever they called “religion,” or whatever else they believed in, in this way. But then I learned about “traditional,” pre-1500, pre-Reformation Christianity in Christianity in the West, 1400-1700 by John Bossy. Here was a cult of social relationships. In which Man (you) had offended God as directly as you offended your neighbor when you slept with his wife; and God looked at you with vicious, attentive eyes like the was a man you just stabbed in the leg with a nail. To be good, or right, free of sin, was not to be harmonized with some kind of abstract, external bounty; it was to give God satisfaction for having pissed him off by eating the apple, to allow him his bloody vengeance; and to avoid any such action as creating such vengeance-demanding conflict in your community. Christ was great because he had allowed that vengeance to fall on himself, instead.
In other words; God was just an omnipotent man wielding a tribal Germanic code of legal ethics that you were born having pissed off; one navigated a righteous life like navigating a high school cafeteria. All was personal honor and vengeance, all life taking place in the petty, reactive parts of our brains. Objective, external, overarching, impersonal truths did not seem to exist to the European mind.
But then, Luther said, and people very quickly believed: to be good, to enter paradise, was not to do anything, to take one or another action. For God had changed. He was no longer a person, capable of personal anger and vengeance, for whom you could do things for, who would particularly notice an individual’s remorse or humiliation, who had eyes that he could turn on you in forgiveness or anger. God was now an impersonal, powerful abstraction.
People had found the printing press in Mainz; soon, brains changed. Reality became different; articulated religion followed. Ironically, in a time that modern liberals perceive as having made God less powerful, God himself became cosmic. The possibility of universal ideas, abstract Constitutions of righteousness covering all beings was born. A sense of good, beyond whatever put you in harmony with people you might pass hundreds of times on the same muddy path in a life lived within 10 square miles, could exist.
Other abstract realities arose alongside the Protestant, Counter-Reformation God. The market. A state that superseded the personality of its leader, to whom loyalty went beyond petty vassalage -- essentially, promises to back him up in a fight. A nation, a supernatural embodiment of the intangible essence of people with shared inheritance.
And the narrative of what’s right in a life, of having lived well, stopped being merely to own land, build a castle, and seek vengeance (for Lords); or to avoid causing violent disturbance through conflict with your fellow peasants. But became, to somehow, become bigger than a person, not just an animal with whom one can talk or exchange looks; but to become seen somehow as a part of these new abstractions, a symbol of the state, the market or the culture made flesh. So, start a business. Run for Congress. Post on Instagram.
Now we have LOLs and little screens. Every story reproducible, mundane, vivid, constant. Every personal conversation now stored in text just around the fiber optic corner. In the way that the written word made God from a scary neighbor to a penetrating power, so has every little rivulet of shame or inspiration in our brains, expressed in short, ugly text messages, been made eternal. Our overarching truths fade, just as we’ve forgotten how to hold together as people. That is kind of sad.
But something else will come. Luckily it will come to us without effort; it will churn up from our collective mash of brains whether or not Ross Douthat writes The Decadent Society. And I have hopes. Maybe we start to believe in some story about humans that includes all our childhood damage, all our bad smells. Maybe we develop some equanimity with respect what scares us, and find purpose and appreciation in expressing the unique totality of one’s perspective.
Maybe we start to understand our bodies and minds as we evolved to live, and maybe we live under systems that are not celestial enforcers of some strange, universal message, but collected instruments of mutual flourishing.
If printing let our ideas be written down, and exist in our higher minds; maybe networks will be what lets us finally see what we truly are.