It’s been widely observed that politics seems to be filling a vacuum that was formerly occupied by religion. Michael Shellenberger has recently been pointing this out with a table of similarities between religion and left-of-center political causes. But is that all there is to say: one religion replaces another? The old religion is dead, long live the new religion? Meet the new boss, same as the old boss?
I think there is more to say. It’s not that these polarizing political issues are simply a new religion. It’s that the new religion is warped and shrunk in specific ways, because it’s been forced into a smaller mental chamber that can hold a narrower range of beliefs.
We can draw this smaller mental chamber on a diagram, once we figure out the right X and Y axes for thinking about modernity. Medieval religion extends across the diagram’s full width, while the new modern religion of politics is confined to the narrower “Panics” chamber on the right. This chamber contains our moral panics against grand secular harms like racism, sexism, and warming. The supernatural is not allowed there, and it’s the supernatural that gave the prior religion such a wide range of content (kosher rules, love your enemies, answered prayers, etc).
We might call this narrower new religion-substitute “real-igion”, since it’s “real” without the supernatural. Fighting racism, misogyny, LGBT-phobia, warming, gun violence, abortion: these are all “real” harms. Fighting about baptism, blasphemy, heresy: not so much. We’re free to quarrel about the supernatural down in the Private chamber, but it’s impossible to believe such ideas strongly enough today to use force over them.
This obviously needs some unpacking, but it gives a concise overview of the model on one slide.
Mechworld rising
What intervened to cause modernity? What drove us from the wide medieval chamber on top, to the divided four-chamber system on the bottom? My vote is for physics equations: Kepler c 1609, Galileo c 1638, Newton 1687, etc. Materialism had been around in intellectual background since Democritus (350 BC), but adding precise equations to the mix was something new under the sun. Equations made materialism more persuasive than ever before, and more reductive than ever before. Newton’s laws were stunning and seemingly universal. They began to elevate materialism from one competing philosophical model among others, to something perceived as more like Science itself: something experimentally proved and replicable by anyone to several decimal places. Philosophers will bridle at the leap from equations to materialism, but this Jurassic Locke model is purely descriptive. I’m not saying any of this is logical, I’m just saying this is how a critical mass of intellectuals digested it on the ground.
As the equations accumulated, many began to suspect this is what reality is really like, at bottom: that under all our anthropomorphic illusions about God and souls and morality or whatever, it’s ultimately all just tiny bits of matter blindly following low-level mathematical equations. Call this the “mechworld” model of reality, for short.
This coldly neutral mechworld model has reshaped our intutions about reality. Medievals thought statements like “God exists” and “murder is wrong” were statements of fact about reality, not fundamentally different in kind from 2+2=4. But thanks to the equations, we moderns now think the only sorts of beliefs that can be objectively true are those compatible with mechworld: i.e., math, scientific findings, and statements about physical properties like weight and location. These set the gold standard for objective truth now. We think such truths are just “out there” for anyone to discover, while statements about religion and ethics are a flimsy bronze that’s more psychological construct than hard fact. Rational people can disagree on bronze beliefs: there’s no “true north” to say who’s right.
This gold standard of objective mechworld truth is so distinctive of modernity that it needs its own chamber on the diagram. Beliefs about math, scientific findings, and physical properties are housed in the gray “Mechworld” chamber on the left. To deny such objective truths is irrational, hence this chamber extends up the Y axis to the highest tier of functional certainty (where denial is irrational and/or indecent). All mechworld gold beliefs are in this chamber; everything to the right is bronze:
While high in certainty, these objective truths have low “social aggression” on the X-axis because they give “no impetus” to our actions: they are icily neutral. If you believe science proves warming will wipe out humanity by 2200 then that belief will sit in your Mechworld chamber as a gold objective truth, but you have to add a bronze value judgment to that (like “that would be bad”) for you to want to do anything about it. All such value judgments sit somewhere to the right of Mechworld on the diagram, where they need cognitive hack(s) to shelter them from mechworld’s relativizing reductionism.
Locke 1.0 (1690)
Our modern concept of the “supernatural” is defined backwards from mechworld. The supernatural is anything that directly violates mechworld: anything that nudges the atoms out of the paths they’d take on their own according to the equations. ESP, astrology, and a God performing miracles all violate that, so they’re all dubiously “unscientific”—and, we confidently expect, impossible to show with a proper double-blind test.
All such supernatural beliefs must now take shelter down in Locke’s “Private” chamber, the archetypal libertarian zone where you’re free to believe possibly dubious ideas so long as you’re not harming anyone: ideas like “Christianity is true” and “jazz is good” and “everyone has a soulmate”. No force can be used to impose such beliefs on others, which is entwined with our intuition that rational and decent people can disagree with such beliefs; hence they’re personal and private. A medieval Christian might have taken exception to a Hindu or atheist moving in next door (“not a decent person!”), but Hindus and atheists are presumptively rational and decent today. By contrast, imagine our new neighbor uses the N word or denies the Holocaust: not a decent person, not invited to our next block party, and if we run into their employer we might mention it. Fighting racism and anti-Semitism are major league today; Christianity is not.
Locke’s system privatized supernatural religion, thereby demoting it from “major league morality” to “minor league morality”, down in the Private chamber. A belief can’t be major league unless (1) you think denial of it is indecent; and (2) you’re willing to impose it on others by force. Hence Christianity is minor league today on both counts. (I subjectively size the Private chamber wider, to indicate it’s a very large chamber that contains the bulk of the beliefs we live on).
To the right of the minor league “Private” chamber is the “Policy” chamber. This is Locke’s “Magistrate”, the civil authority, who’s allowed to use judicious force to make sure the folks down in Private don’t harm each other.
The Magistrate governs with consent of the governed (majority rule), and can’t violate the people’s civil rights (to life, liberty, and property). This chamber includes beliefs about our criminal law (“murder is wrong and rightly punished with response X”), our personal jury trial votes (“I think Y is not guilty”), and our positions as voters on non-panic issues (“the correct copyright policy is Z”). We understand that rational and decent people can disagree on such things—but unlike Private, we are willing to impose these beliefs on others anyway, assuming the procedural requirements for judicious force are met: the correct vote was taken, the correct police procedures are used, etc.
These dual Private and Policy chambers are the essential core of Locke’s original design, “Locke 1.0”, as based on his Second Treatise of Government and Letters on Toleration (c 1690). The Policy chamber has since expanded beyond Locke’s original limits, but it retains its essential levels of functional certainty and social aggression.
Locke 2.0: Jurassic Locke
The next chamber over on the diagram is the “Panics” chamber, and it was not part of Locke’s 1.0 system. Locke would have been horrified by it. It’s a failure mode, a partial collapse of his design. By analogy to the Jurassic Park movie (where “life finds a way”), Locke designs an ingenious Locke Park (Locke 1.0, 1690), but “outrage finds a way” and it partly collapses into the Jurassic Locke 2.0 system we’re still under today. America slouched into this chamber in the 1800s, and we’ve had a permanent storm system of moral panics thundering above the head of Locke’s Magistrate ever since.
I say storm “system”, because from early on these panics have tended to be pursued in clusters. By 1850, the same Unitarian could be seen crusading against three or four moral atrocities simultaneously: slavery, alcohol, war in general, female inequality, and so on. Our American Establishment today is similarly promiscuous, tackling racism, sexism, LGBT-phobia, warming, gun violence, fascism, etc. It’s the portfolio of these panics that comprise our Establishment’s “major league morality” today. Historically, most humans would be content to tackle one giant moral atrocity in their lifetimes. We moderns are fixing 6 or 7 simultaneously.
The refusal to privatize
There’s a wonderfully apt old word from c 1635: “pulpiteer”, one who preaches from a pulpit. I like it because it can cover the entire Jurassic transition. The Puritan pastor of 1650 holding forth from a church pulpit was a pulpiteer, as is the Harvard professor holding forth from a university pulpit today. And “pulpit” has the connotation of calling people to greater righteousness, greater holiness.
As Rodney Stark has pointed out, only a certain subset of people are drawn to distinguish themselves by superior holiness. And I’d say many of those who are, tend to want a maximal pulpit. They want to be able to rail at everyone up and down the social ladder, not just their coreligionists who’ve opted in. And they want to be able to call for force. And why not? If something is a matter of ultimate import, why shouldn’t we use force? Savonarola’s bonfire of vanities: smash the icons! Full-throated preaching, unrestrained, letting it rip, catharsis. Prophets scold down at everyone from the moral heights, where demanding force is par for the course.
If you were a pastor committed to supernatural religious doctrine around 1820, you could certainly keep preaching that supernatural material, but only down in Locke’s Private chamber. Locke’s 1.0 design was backwards compatible with supernatural Christianity. It achieved this compatibility through something like elegant software architecture. The various denominations could continue to run as “apps” in Locke’s Private container, where they were safely sandboxed from damaging the rest of the system and each other. But the price of admission was relinquishing force. The apps could no longer make function calls to the civil authority or mob panic libraries.
This was a big “ask”. No more calling for coercive action. No more excoriating your peaceful neighbors for being indecent heathens. You could still excoriate your fellow Calvinists for their mistakes about the Trinity, but that’s because they were there in the church with you voluntarily and could leave at any time. Freedom of association prevents any “real” harm from happening within a denomination: just form a new denomination if the old one’s so bad.
And so old school pulpiteers of the supernatural had to relinquish their maximal pulpit, their major league pulpit, and step dutifully down into the minor league pulpit Locke had prepared for them in Private. Why did they go? Again, I think it was ultimately because of the rising scientific materialism, propelled by exact equations like Newton’s for how matter behaves: a clockwork atomic universe with an ever-receding "God of the gaps”. Faced with that new mechworld model of reality—that un-enchanted model of reality—we stopped believing in the supernatural strongly enough to impose it on others. Witch hunts and heretic burnings stopped.
But what if you were a pulpiteer c 1820 who didn’t want to privatize? What if you wanted to stay up in the majors? In hindsight it was pretty simple. You just gradually shift the focus of your preaching to grand secular harms: “real” harms like slavery, or war, or Big Alcohol (temperance). Such atrocities are still “real” and solid enough for us to maximally slam those on the other side, in a way we can no longer maximally slam those on the wrong side of supernatural baptism or Trinity debates. Conceptually, the transition went something like this (across various issues):
1650: God abhors the Pope (full supernatural)
1850: God abhors slavery (transitional moment: God and our secular moral intuition find it atrocious)
1950: Racism is abhorrent (full secular)
The Battle Hymn of the Republic (1861) captures the fleeting transition in amber. Its melody was taken from a purely supernatural-themed Southern camp meeting song that blacks and whites would sing in the late 1700s, published in 1807: “Oh Brothers will you meet me On Canaan’s happy shore; There we’ll shout and give Him Glory, For glory is His own.” Julia Ward Howe gave it its martial Civil War lyrics in 1861, which include:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored ...
I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel ...
Let the Hero born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel ...
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat ...
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.
This is prophetic Old Testament violence, directed not at a supernatural infraction like Baal worship, but at a grand secular harm (of slavery).
Nothing signals “major league morality” like prophetic calls for violence: that is major league morality in neon. But by 1861 such militant moral certainty could be mustered only against grand secular harms, not supernatural infractions that (thanks to the equations) were seeming increasingly imaginary.
Moving forward, supernatural leg braces like “As he died to make men holy” would be quietly dropped, as the secular panics became able to stand on their own two feet.
On the modern side of the supernatural-to-secular Jurassic transition now, conservative pro-lifers today will picket an abortion clinic but not an atheist group office. Why? Because abortion is a grand secular harm: killing millions of babies. And the proofs they give in public debate are secular: heartbeat, brainwaves, viability outside womb, human DNA. Where they can’t give secular rationales (as against atheism or improper baptism), they stay out of public debate. They respect our new Jurassic moral architecture, just as today’s Left does. They’re trapped within it too, just as all of us are—all of us except a fringe we all dismiss as kooky: e.g., “Reconstructionsts” who want to stone adulterers and homosexuals. How quaintly horrifying: using force over supernaturally revealed Scripture alone, without some bright secular harm to justify it.
We non-kooky Westerners now all agree on modernity’s four chambers: Mechworld, Private, Policy, and Panics—and the levels of functional certainty and social aggression justified by each chamber. We just differ in some respects on the specific beliefs we slot into each chamber.
If we want to morally panic now, call for government force, and excoriate strangers as indecent, we agree we need to do it over some grand secular harm in the Panics chamber. This is why conservative opposition to abortion has held steady while opposition to homosexuality has relatively collapsed: it was hard to articulate a grand secular harm from homosexuality. It’s also why trans foes seem to be getting some traction: “groomers sterilizing children”.
America’s Establishment has now fully transitioned to a portfolio of these secular moral panics as its major league morality, and it’s practically “all panics, all the time” now in our public square: earnest puritanical scolding at the appalling indecency of racism, sexism, LGBT-phobia, warming, gun violence, etc., set off against the counter-squabbling of those indignantly denying the charges (deniers being a necessary part of the ecosystem). Each issue thunders above the head of Locke’s Magistrate as not merely political, but an existential test of each person’s character.
All through the transition, the colleges never stopped being seminaries. Harvard was founded in 1636 as a Puritan seminary only; it had no other departments. It was our top seminary for the Puritan religion then, and it’s still our top seminary for the Puritan “real-igion” today. The Harvard Holy Horrified: 400 years of fighting indecency.
Shrinkage
With no public-tier God to define a positive sort of holiness, holiness is now derived negatively from the indecencies we oppose. The darker and more widespread the indecency (racism, sexism...), the more brightly our holiness shines in comparison. We’re holy because we’re horrified—and because they aren’t.
This need for this negative holiness is what has so constricted the subject matter and emotional range of our new real-igion, relative to the much more expansive scope of the old supernatural religions.
For belief X to be part of your major league morality, you have to believe denial of X is indecent. Pre-modern religious orthodoxy elevated a very wide range of beliefs to that major league level of “denial is indecent”, because they were all God’s word. This ranged from imperatives to extravagant charity (“love your enemies”, Good Samaritan), to seemingly arbitrary rules about diet and dress, to consolations like priestly blessings and answered prayers, to various fantastical tales that actually happened (like Joshua stopping the sun), to judicial procedures like “eye for eye”, to orthodoxy enforcement mechanisms like Inquisitions, Crusades, pogroms, heretic burnings, etc. That enormous range of content all gets to be part of the same major league morality because it’s all God’s word, it’s all orthodoxy, and it will all be enforced by the orthodoxy enforcement mechanisms that are part of that morality.
Hence we could say pre-modern religions had a weaponized “hard rind” of enforcement, enclosing a “gooey center” of love and consolation and peace (love your enemies, forgiveness, mercy, hope for afterlife, etc).
The thing about our modern secular panics is they’re essentially all “hard rind”, no gooey center. They have no legitimizing umbrella to extend over a wider range of beliefs. Secular panics have rhetorical power in an atomic universe because they’re secular, not supernatural: the harms are real (police shootings, trans suicides, species extinctions, abortions). But that very power is what narrows them to just fixing the harm itself. No supernatural add-ons like kosher diet or water baptism or Mormon underwear or loving your enemies. No goo.
Why should we love and forgive the harmers while the harm is still raging? Let them stop, then we’ll talk about forgiveness. Meanwhile such premature goo is just a distracting enabler of white supremacy and all the other political indecencies. “People are dying”. I heard that phrase on NPR five years ago and it’s stuck with me. I’ve noticed it frequently since, as a sort of secular panic refrain. The deaths create a moral emergency and a moral imperative to fix it. If trans kids don’t get puberty blockers they may die of suicide. Are you on the side of decency, or indecency? People are dying.
Fixing the harm can include rebuking the harmers til they stop harming, it can include legislation (which is force), it can include protests and boycotts, it can include private initiatives like minority scholarships and diversity outreach, it can include educational measures like Black History Month, it can include linguistic remedies like “African-American” instead of “black”. But there it ends, with measures that can plausibly help fix the harm. Secular panics are limited to that and can go no further. Only actual fixes get the “denial is indecent” umbrella afforded by secular panic.
And so this “real-igion” gives no reasons for peace and joy despite the harms. No more consolations like forgiveness, answered prayers, or gratitude for what we’ve been given. No more assurance that God will ultimately punish the guilty and protect the innocent. All of that is just unhelpful distraction from the “people are dying” emergency.
So we can see what’s been lost in “real-igion” shrinkage, let’s start by taking stock of the full range of supernatural religion. Picture the entire sweep of medieval supernatural religion as extending across the top of the diagram at the high “denial is indecent” level of functional certainty. All orthodox beliefs get high certainty because they’re God’s word, but these different orthodox beliefs can vary in their degree of social aggression.
Some trivially neutral orthodox beliefs like “the tax collector’s name was Matthew” impart no impetus to do or feel anything; they’re purely neutral, like mechworld truths. Other orthodox beliefs motivate us to do and feel things short of using force against others: this would include “gooey center” beliefs like love your enemies, forgiveness, awe at God’s design, and so on. Some orthodox beliefs overlap with what we’d consider our modern civil authority’s use of force but short of moral panic; this would include principles like “an eye for an eye”, and perhaps regulations regarding the Sabbath. Other orthodox beliefs can trigger moral panics culminating in mob-driven witch hunts or heretic burnings.
The old supernatural “hard rind”, then, is whatever beliefs justified the use of force and mob panic to maintain and enforce the religious orthodoxy (see “judicious force” and “mob force” buckets on X axis). And the old “goo” is “passenger beliefs” that enjoyed the bump in certainty created by the rind without contributing to enforcement themselves (like “love your enemies”, forgiveness, etc). You might call these beliefs “free riders”, but I’ll avoid that since I suspect they helped the overall vitality of the system.
This expansive supernatural orthodoxy of goo plus rind could not withstand the arrival of physics equations and mechworld, because that entire range of orthodoxy relied on supernatural revelation for its legitimacy. Proofs like Moses parting the Red Sea and Christ’s resurrection went from legitimizing evidence to dubious violations of natural causality.
And so the old orthodoxy was subjected to two processes simultaneously: (1) Lockean privatization, which pushed the wide range of supernatural religion down into Private while lopping off its hard rind “force” parts; and (2) the Jurassic Locke transition, where those who refused to privatize shifted their preaching to grand secular panics.
Pre-mechworld, our Establishment “major league morality” was an expansive supernatural orthodoxy of goo plus rind. Post-mechworld, our Establishment “major league morality” is the much narrower set of rind-only secular panics (racism, sexism, etc.). This loss of content can be visualized on the diagram as a width-wide loss of content: horizontal shrinkage.
It’s important to understand this width-wise shrinkage of “real-igion” includes not only the loss of the supernatural, but also the loss of all non-scientific theory unboosted by inflammatory secular harm: e.g., things like Aristotle’s ethics. We no longer believe such non-scientific theory is the kind of thing that can be objectively true, in the way physics is objectively true. We’re still free to believe such theory, but only down at the “denial is rational and decent” level of certainty in Private.
Consider the various theories of ethics advanced by philosophers today: deontology, virtue ethics, utilitarianism, etc. Even the leading advocates of a theory are unwilling to treat those who disagree as indecent. They do not say: “How can you be a good person without deontology? Away from my sight, utilitarian!” Nor do they treat the other side as irrational: “Can’t you grasp my proof of deontology, like 2+2=4? I will speak very slowly as I explain the derivation.” No: though ethics is presumably quite relevant to being a decent person, they treat denial of their own ethical theory as both rational and decent. Isn’t that striking?
So what will they ostracize others over? What is indecent to them? Same as the rest of us: they’ll ostracize those who run afoul of our secular panics (racism, sexism, etc.). In other words, they agree with our Jurassic Locke 2.0 architecture and subordinate their own ethical theories accordingly, as merely Private beliefs that rational and decent people can deny.
All such non-scientific theory and all supernatural beliefs have been forced down into Private, leaving an uninhabited dead zone in the regions of higher certainty above. Mechworld has made this zone uninhabitable. No hacks exist to elevate such beliefs to a higher level of certainty.
If you look at this diagram of modernity as an X-ray, you could interpret this dark zone as a tumor.
There is now much less content up at the high “denial is decent” level of certainty. Our new “real-igion” has shrunk dramatically, relative to the supernatural orthodoxies that came before.
Our public tier morality (which can use mob force and excoriate others as indecent) has shrunk to the fixing of grand secular harms (racism, sexism, etc).
The Jurassic Locke transition was smooth and institutional: the pulpiteers who refused to privatize could just gradually shift the focus of their preaching from supernatural doctrine (like baptism) to grand secular harms (like slavery). But the smoothness of the transition belies a long-term change in the character of their message. They were cramming themselves into a smaller box. All the goo had to be abandoned: it can’t fit in that box. Forgiveness doesn’t make sense in a “people are dying” moral emergency. And so over time our major league morality became progressively darker, and more tightly limited to fixing grand systemic secular Harms.
Only measures to fix the inflammatory harm get the cognitive shielding of our secular moral panics: only they can now achieve the “denial is indecent” level of functional certainty. All other moral beliefs (like supernatural doctrine or Aristotle’s ethics) get relativized and corroded by mechworld down to a lower degree of certainty.
The shrinkage shows up in various ways. The full list is longer, but for now I’ll cover: (1) constricted emotional range; (2) constricted personal holiness (rage saints); and (3) lower ceiling: God is dead but Satan is incognito.
Shrinkage 1: constricted emotional range
Panics are driven by outrage, the nuclear human emotion, so anger is certainly a predominant emotion in our modern “real-igion”. But it’s not by any means the only emotion. Fixing the harm can also involve: exultation, after an election victory; anxiety, over what the other side is cooking up next; pity/compassion for the victims; derisive laughter, as at a “destroys” video; us vs them bonding/validation, with others of our side against the harmers; contempt/disgust, for the harmers’ tawdry excuses; and pride, for opposing the harm when so many don’t. Panics put us on a hamster wheel of these emotions with the daily news cycle.
But panics can’t extend their legitimizing umbrella to other human emotions like: gratitude (for what, while the harm is still raging?); peace (same); joy (same); forgiveness (after they stop harming!); awe (at God’s design, beauty, vastness of universe); security (feeling loved and cleansed and safe as a child of God); humility (true acceptance of our genuine flaws and weaknesses, as opposed to weaponized “confessions” of privilege that elevate us against those we hate and slam).
These unlegitimized emotions are now minor league. We can still feel them, but only down in Private, where they must defer to any panics they brush up against.
Shrinkage 2: constricted personal holiness (full spectrum saints → rage saints)
Only a subset of people feel drawn to distinguish themselves by superior righteousness. Medievals used the term “saints” for those who who had most fully drunk the orthodox kool-aid: most fully committed to it, most fully abandoned to it. As such, they tended to express their saintliness in a “full spectrum” way, across a wide range of orthodox beliefs. They could be extravagantly loving and charitable to the point of impracticality, giving away all their money or clothes. They could be dauntingly ascetic, eating little and wearing uncomfortable hair shirts. They could pray efficaciously, performing miracles and healings. And they could be stern rebukers of sin, like St Nicholas slapping Arius at the Council of Nicea.
What is the fully-committed equivalent to this personal holiness, for our new major league morality of secular Panics? All that survives is the hard rind of rebuking sin. With the supernatural now privatized, the other “full spectrum” feats make no sense. Impractical charity (like giving away everything) won’t fix systemic problems. Ascetic hair shirts are pointless. Miraculously answered prayers? Of course not.
What’s left is a single-minded commitment to rebuking sin. What we admire is the activist who spots the sins earlier than most, like Larry Kramer forming ACT UP in 1987 to protest the Establishment’s insufficient response to AIDS. We admire the activist who’s angry enough to loudly call out the sin, with petitions, protests, boycotts, and traffic blockages. And we admire the activist who doesn’t tire, doesn’t get seduced into more lucrative employment, and keeps calling out the sin, keeps fighting the good fight. And so full-spectrum medieval saints become one-note modern rage saints. This one-note focus simply reflects the shrinkage of our major league morality: the chamber is smaller. Medieval holiness was under shadow of a supernatural eternity. Modern panic holiness is under the much narrower shadow of secular atrocity:
One early rage saint was the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879), who launched The Liberator magazine in 1831. Garrison discovered Frederick Douglass and raised him to prominence. On lecture tour he apparently irked Douglas by urging him to just “tell your story” of suffering under slavery, and leave the broader theorizing about the issue to intellectuals like Garrison. A 1913 biographer who admired Garrison described him like this:
That slavery was wrong, everyone knew in his heart. The point seen by Garrison was the practical point that the slavery issue was the only thing worth thinking about, and that all else must be postponed till slavery was abolished. … His power of arousing uncontrollable disgust was a gift, like magic; and he seems to sail upon it as a demon upon the wind.
Garrison’s magical gift was rebuking sin: arousing “uncontrollable disgust” at the sin of slavery. His biographer’s insightful point applies more generally to all our secular panics today: that these moral emergencies are “the only thing worth thinking about” and “all else must be postponed”.
Some recent rage saint sightings:
Of saintly attributes, only the rebuking of sin remains public tier: the hard rind. The goo is now privatized. Some activists may have some sweet “goo” traits in their personality as well, but these are now merely Private idiosyncrasies, not essential to their public missions.
Shrinkage 3: lower ceiling: God is dead but Satan is incognito
Supernatural Christianity had extreme range, from something like +100 (God and heaven) to -90 (Satan and hell). Everyday life extended upward from ordinary people to saints to angels to God and heaven, and downward to witches to demons to Satan and hell. In genre, the framwork and human life within it was like a fairy tale: super-bright highs, super-dark lows, good triumphs, and everyone’s arc finishes super high or super low accordingly.
Jurassic Locke has shrunk this range very unevenly. Our major league morality is now much more bottom-heavy, extending from something like +10 (just a little above our everyday gray reality) to -50 (Hitler and slavery).
Secular utopias are not believable without the supernatural, but secular dystopias are: think Nazi Germany, the slaving South, The Handmaid’s Tale, etc. Preternaturally virtuous people seem implausible, while desperately wicked people are our daily mental bread. Aphoristically speaking: God is dead, Satan is incognito. Grandiose good has been privatized out of public life, but grandiose evil remains at public tier as Hitler and slavery etc. We needn’t be solemn and hushed at an altar (which may be unreal), but we must be solemn and hushed by Auschwitz (which is all too real). And so our major league morality takes on a lopsidedly darker tone.
When you subtract the supernatural, our major league morality can still reach halfway to hell with secular atrocities like Hitler and slavery, but it can’t reach halfway to heaven because positive secular opposites to Hitler and slavery don’t exist. Christianity would comment: “Yes, it’s a fallen world, and if you want a higher ceiling you need the supernatural”.
Lockean privatization demotes God, but Jurassic Locke disguises Satan. The Jurassic transition is assymmetrical.
Garrison had the magical gift of “arousing uncontrollable disgust” at the political sin of slavery. He could paint it super-dark. There is no secular super-light equivalent in the other direction; God and heaven are privatized.
As the supernatural began to recede c 1750-1840, for a while there were hopes for new secular utopias that could be built through rational planning and education, now that the interfering nonsense of religious superstition was being cleared away. These plans were mostly painted in super-bright whites without the need for much dark: “It’s mostly all fantastic upside, if we just do this and that...”. See, e.g., Robert Owen’s writings and his utopian socialist community of New Harmony, Indiana (1825), which failed two years later.
None of these panned out, and it turned out what worked in practice is the reverse: painting issues as mainly super dark now, with any glimmers of light on the distant horizon. Marxism had this form: while it held out a vague worker’s paradise in future, the great majority of its preaching was on the intolerable darkness of capitalism now, which it saw as causing poverty, war, imperialism, racial and gender inequality, etc.
On the lowered ceiling, consider our secular panic against sexism. One of its most cited proofs is the statistic that women make “83 cents on the dollar” relative to men. Assuming this is 100% accurate, what’s striking is how little upside it gives. If we equalized male and female pay around 91.5 cents, women would get a raise of about 10%. Nice, but hardly the stuff of utopia. Likewise no matter how much rape there is, stopping it completely would not transport women to heaven; it would merely deliver them to the gray everyday state of not being raped.
The old joke goes: “Why do I keep hitting myself with a hammer? Because it feels so good when I stop.” Our panics are like that. We are hammered by appalling moral atrocities and our goal is to simply stop them, so we can get back to the gray normality of not being hit.
If the genre of our old major league morality was fairy tale, what genre are these modern secular panics? I’d say they seem closest in pattern to a horror movie. A horror movie starts in the gray everyday: a family, say, or a group of teens. But then a grotesquely negative anomaly arrives: the monster appears. The rest of the movie is the struggle to wrench things back from that horror to the gray everyday. Horror movies don’t end in utopia; they end up back in the everyday gray family scene where they started, maybe minus a few victims.
The monsters in horror movies are temporary aberrations from the gray everyday, and our secular panics are like that. “The point seen by Garrison was the practical point that the slavery issue was the only thing worth thinking about, and that all else must be postponed till slavery was abolished.” We see them as temporary moral emergencies so terrible that any decent person should want to fix them. Then we can get back to everyday gray normality.
But the thing about our secular panics is: no many how many resources we apply to them, we never seem to reach that promised gray normality. The horror movie never ends.
The Harvard Holy Horrified: 400 years of fighting indecency. In 1636, the horrors were part of a fairy tale framework extending upward to heaven. Jurassic Locke has lowered that ceiling, squeezing Harvard’s pulpiteers into what amounts to an endless moral horror movie.
To admit enough progress has been made to move us from “moral atrocity” to the merely imperfect zone of the gray everyday, would mean the emergency measures could be lifted. Our Battle Hymns could be muted. Denial would no longer be indecent, and the absolute moral imperatives of our Jurassic panics would collapse. Unlevitated by a raging secular indecency, Harvard’s pulpits would finally sink down into Private, and we would be back to the cool utilitarian tradeoffs of the pre-Jurassic system Locke originally envisioned: Locke 1.0 (1690). Will that ever happen?
Enlightenment liberals like Andrew Sullivan want to unwind Jurassic Locke. “Integralist” theocrats like Adrian Vermeule want to unwind mechworld and the equations. Easier said than done in both cases!
Pausing here for now
This was a quick and dirty pass through the model to highlight the theme of “shrinkage”. There are additional kinds of shrinkage I left out, and there are two other kinds of warpings caused by the modern dead zone I didn’t cover at all.
The worst omission is not explaining the specific cognitive hacks I see as animating Locke 1.0, Jurassic Locke 2.0 and the four chambers. As I see it the hacks are what create the chambers, and give them the specific degrees of functional certainty and social aggression they each enjoy. I’ll be filling these gaps in subsequent posts.
It would have been more straightforward for me to start with the hacks and build up the model step-by-step historically from there: tracing developments from medieval orthodoxy, to Hobbes (whom I omitted entirely here), to Locke 1.0, and Jurassic Locke 2.0. And only at the very end arrive at shrinkage and modernity’s other deformations.
My fear was an exhaustive step-by-step treatise like that would be too “can’t see the forest for the trees”, and I’d lose most of you in the first chapter. I hope this quick “shrinkage” tour shows you enough of the forest that some of you will stick around. Thanks for coming this far.
This tour may also give you a leg up on the model summary I posted here in August, in form of about 200 powerpoint slides. I thought they were self-explanatory without me talking through them, but no one seems to agree.
Again, I’ve been mysteriously demonetized by Stripe so don’t pay for this substack.