Returning to Church won't save us from nihilism

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/returning-to-church-wont-save-us-from-nihilism/

by hhs • 10 months ago

27 73 10 months ago

thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

The absolute best resource I've found for educating myself about this topic is John Vervaeke's free online course "Awakening from the meaning crisis". You can search it in YouTube or Spotify.

He explains in detail exactly why a "nostalgic return to religion" cannot save us from, not just nihilism, but the entire set of crises western society is undergoing.

MonkeyClub• 10 months ago

The series:

https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLND1JCRq8Vuh3f0P5qjrSdb...

mallowdram4• 10 months ago

The crises stems not from a loss or lack of meaning, it's from recognizing how limited our forms like narratives and myths/religions provide access to meaning. If we fully recognize the meaning load in any event, it's endlessly connected to past and future events. Any event's local-load is likewise massive. The idea we use metaphors as meaning sinks is bizarre. Metaphors are arbitrary, meaning is not, it is specific. This is the inherent problem.

The scaffolding we use for meaning, language, myth, causality, narratives, these are all Pleistocene tools that have long overstyed their welcome. Access to meaning is a total failure of imagination of the basics.

oidar2• 10 months ago

I'm not disagreeing, but what alternatives are there? And to continue with the tool metaphor: How would we know if it's a better tool? Without a vantage point where we could judge both the tools we have now to the alternative, we might be just trading one flawed tool for another. But I'm not going throw away a flashlight because it doesn't light up the universe either. At least with a flashlight, I can see something.

metalman2• 10 months ago

The best way to deal with nihilism is by also becoming a narcisist, which as we can see from many of the people in power, is extra creeply effective.

NooneAtAll3• 10 months ago

and the best way to deal with narcisism is becoming a nihilist, thus creating the spiral of doom

metalman2• 10 months ago

and the only way to thwart the spiral of doom, is with an anti spiral of absurdity of the intentional kind, rather than the other variety but wow, I mean WOW, there has never been so much material to whack a mole , I just watched a short vid of what looked and sounded like a bunch of school teachers and fast food kids lead by someone cosplaying captain america taking on the icestapo and they opened up with a barage of "less leathal" weapons, including a sniper, and dozen storm troopers grabbed and shit stomped captain america all thats missing is circus music

intalentive• 10 months ago

we need to work to bring back the Ancient Greek model of the polis and in particular the Ancient Greek model of politics as what gives life meaning.

The Ancient Greek model of politics isn't compatible with liberal pluralism. The former assumes a common end and the latter assumes diverse conflicting ends. The Ancient Greek model looks more like modern China than it does like modern America or Europe.

evanjrowley2• 10 months ago

The ancient Greek model assumes a common end but in practice there were many conflicts demonstrating the ends were conflicting. The model itself is like the ideal form. Suggesting that western politics adopt this model when the current state of things opposes it is not necessarily an error.

mallowdram4• 10 months ago

5th C BC Greece was far from an ideal state, the collapse is visible here in rampant gambling. Take a civilization class, the first thing you learn is the West is overly confident and never expects change so change is imposed. While the Chinese expect change, and can pivot when things get bad. Continuity isn't a Western way.

rattlesnakedave9• 10 months ago

Aside from being true, Christianity is basically the only way to inoculate yourself against mimetic violence spirals. Which is missed here.

vkou3• 10 months ago

Many modern supply-side Christians don't believe in any of those parts of the Bible.

Turn the other cheek, love thy neighbour, etc, etc, are not something they are keen on.

rattlesnakedave9• 10 months ago

Yeah, that’s the problem. In my estimation a large part of it is because Christianity, especially as practiced in the United States, is a cultural phenomenon. Evangelicalism has won the popularity contest, and it’s not moored by anything. There’s an uptick in new Catholics and Orthodox converts though, which are more “moored” if you will by tradition and at least some kind of doctrinal constraint.

c0balt• 10 months ago

Why in a particular do you believe that Christianity is the only religion and/or belief fit for this purpose? It seems like a very bold statement given the overlapping and diverse nature of religious beliefs.

rattlesnakedave9• 10 months ago

The sermon on the mount was a moral quantum leap at the time it was delivered. “Love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you.” You aren’t getting that anywhere else. Additionally, the entire narrative around the crucifixion of a perfectly innocent victim is designed to put the “what if I’m wrong” voice in the back of your head when you’re engaging in mob or retributive violence.

krapp5• 10 months ago

Christianity has been awash in "mimetic violence spirals" for a thousand years, and some of those memes come right out of the Bible. WTF are you even talking about?

rattlesnakedave9• 10 months ago

People have free will and make poor decisions, but on whole it has pulled society in the right direction over the long arc of history.

UtopiaPunk• 10 months ago

I'm sympathetic to your take, but I disagree. I personally find a powerful call for non-violence in Christianity, specifically in the Gospels. But there are at least a few other worldviews out there that result in a life dedicated to peace and love.

And I think this is tangential to your point, but it has to be said that there are many different approaches to Christianity, many of which have lead (and are actively leading) to terrible violence.

tim333• 10 months ago

Christians have done a good bit of violence, including the crusades and Hitler and Putin calling themselves Christian. I think Jainism might be the least violent of the major religions.

daymanstep• 10 months ago

Classic guilt by association. By the same logic you can argue that vegetarianism has murdered millions because Hitler was a vegetarian.

kelseyfrog3• 10 months ago

In a recent op-ed, [David Brooks] warns that a rigid political climate on the left has led people on the right of the political spectrum to actively embrace nihilism.

That’s a strange dodge. "The Left made me do it" is a child's excuse, not an analysis.

The deeper truth is that nihilism isn’t born of politics. Nihilism what's left when after the exhaustion of meaning under total commodification. It's born of the spectacle, the replacement of reality with its endless representations. Every human relation is mediated through an economic relation, and eventually every gesture, every feeling, every passing thought gets rendered into a commodity.

We are desperate for connection, and the spectacle knows it. So it offers us platforms that promise intimacy but can’t deliver it. They were designed not to connect us to other humans but to make us friends with brands. We log in for friendship and get advertising.

Go outside? Good luck. It's empty because this stupid city was designed around cars, and even if there are people, they're tucked into their phones. It's a social ghost town.

If I propose to decommission the spectacle, I'd expect to receive a bewildering array of responses: "naive," "utopian," "impossible." So here we are, trapped in a world of our making where no one has the choice to enter nor to leave and everyone has been leveraged to maintaining it despite no one wanting it.

Good job. We have only ourselves to blame.

notmyjob5• 10 months ago

Religion is anti-fragile. The more persecution and negative press it gets, the more certainty we feel in our faiths. I would point out that nihilism is the opposite of religious faith, so the author is a little bit confused on that point.

kelseyfrog3• 10 months ago

This is only true for some religions. Since the author mentions Nietzsche, it feels fair to pull in On the Genealogy of Morality.

Many religions today have this feature because they out-competed religions that didn't, but it's not a universal feature of religions by a long shot. If anything, religions that have this feature are inextricably connected to social coping mechanisms(evidently due the persecution).

notmyjob5• 10 months ago

If you define religion to include all possible religions, even those that have few adherents, or those that have disappeared or even those not yet created, that’s not a very useful definition. I use “religion” like most people, to refer to Abrahamic religions and large eastern religions like Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, etc

whytaka4• 10 months ago

Negative press about religion, whether its corruption or its inefficacy, has led to lower participation in religion the world over.

notmyjob5• 10 months ago

Correlation does not equal causation. I think people don’t participate in religion because it asks of them. Many people are lazy, greedy or hedonistic. It takes effort and “practice” to be virtuous or religious.

Before Christianity took off there was plenty of “bad press,” to put mildly. Yet here we are.

I guess another way I might restate my point is to invoke the Streisand effect, or note the haters “doth protest too much” or similar notions. YMMV but repeated cathedral burnings and church and synagogue massacres had a remarkable effect on my perception of good and evil. Shooting toddlers at their morning mass; if that ain’t evil then nothing else makes any sense to me.

DaveZale2• 10 months ago

Sure, but for many, it's a place for community too. Rites of passage. Selecting a godparent. And singing! Hey without gospel music, we might not have had Motown.

Also, in some religions the temples are places for job searching, business networking... nothing wrong with that.

I wish I could have faith, a double major in science and philosophy killed all of that. But mystical moments still happen without all of the religious trappings, in conversation or nature.

I just don't know. Here in the US, Christian ethics still predominate, usually, and without organized religious participation, will that continue? Is it too much work to agonize over decisions without it?

BalinKing2• 10 months ago

Obviously it’s a very broad question, but could I ask you to elaborate on why “a double major in science and philosophy killed all of that”?

thisoneisreal• 10 months ago

You didn't ask me, but I can respond as someone with a similar background. I grew up in a religious household. I spent about a decade from ages 18-28 studying philosophy both academically and casually, then entered a technical field and got reaquainted with science.

Many philosophical problems informed my view of religion, but probably the most profound were Carl Sagan's invisible dragon and the problem that there are so many differing and incompatible religions. Many religious people will freely admit their beliefs have no evidence, and yet from my point of view, if that's true, how can anyone claim their particular religion is correct? Why should I believe in Hinduism instead of Catholicism? I never got a satisfactory answer to that in any of my philosophy classes or reading. (The problem of evil is another strong one, but didn't have as big of an impact on me as the first two.)

As far as science goes, the two main contributors to that were biology and physics (although there are some countervailing forces there: the order of the universe truly does seem miraculous). Jay Gould's essay "non-moral nature" where he describes parasites that lay their eggs on paralyzed victims, then the eggs hatch and the larvae eat the victims alive, was probably the first thing I read that had bearing on religion. But if you look at nature generally there is obviously an overwhelming amount of suffering. Kids who die from random genetic mutations, animals that get eaten alive crying. I could never square any of that with God.

As far as physics, what really gets me is the sheer immensity and seeming indifference to human scales. Because of the speed of light, we are basically trapped within our own universe. Space is mostly an enormous empty void, and there is no sign that any other planet would be especially hospitable to our species. On a more mundane level, human beings have been killed in incredibly stupid ways, like the guy who was irradiated to death because of a software bug in the x-ray machine. So you put all of that together and it just doesn't suggest any sort of divine guidance to everything going on around us. (Which isn't to say there aren't counterarguments, but that's the sort of evidence and thought processes I imagine the parent was referring to.)

DaveZale2• 10 months ago

Well for one thing, even in freshman philos, we were introduced to the 5 different kinds of truth. That sets up the foundation for more years of study in which faith in anything is hard to recognize as objectively true.

But that university specialized in analytical philosophy, which I learned decades later. You will never stop learning, that's for sure

cvoss• 10 months ago

The author's understanding of ritual/tradition as the sum total what religion means is at best extremely naive, but I am receiving it as condescending and dismissive. There was a way for the author to redeem the subtitle of the article. He could have gone down the route of "ritual for ritual's sake is not good, but the bigger thing that ritual is attached to is good". But instead, the argument went "religious ritual is empty and has nothing else attached to it, and that's bad; let's be sure to attach Humanism to the ritual to make it good."

The irony of the whole thing is that Humanism is a religion too, though many people won't recognize it as such. This makes the author's argument doubly misguided.

AaronAPU• 10 months ago

Well, Church isn’t God.

So I’ll grant them the title. But the stronger claim, that God won’t save us from nihilism, I disagree with entirely.

deadeye• 10 months ago

This reads more like misdirection than analysis. Suggesting religion is just a collection of empty rituals is just sad.

It's almost as if he's trying to prevent those looking for help from considering religion.

"You don't want those gold bars over there, they're just painted rocks". But are they?

roxolotl2• 10 months ago

Very funny this is partly in response to a Brooks piece. He fits nihilism very well. Doesn’t every really write about much and when cornered contends that most of his attempts to make points are really just vibes[0] like famously claiming $60 spent on alcohol and a $17 burger make him relatable to Americans struggling with inflation[1].

But particularly hilarious is that he wrote this exact piece two months ago in the Atlantic[2]. He argued that the Greeks had it right and we all need to be more virtuous again.

As someone who’d describe themselves as a virtue ethicist I’d be inclined to agree. Utilitarianism leads to the bureaucratic tyranny Arendt discusses and deontology is just as hollow as belief in belief. The reality is that we can’t optimize ourselves out of where we are.

[0] https://www.foodandwine.com/1911-smoke-house-bbq-david-brook...

[1] https://newrepublic.com/article/142708/david-brooks-tyranny-...

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/07/trump-admi...

jhanschoo2• 10 months ago

Utilitarianism leads to the bureaucratic tyranny Arendt discusses and deontology is just as hollow as belief in belief.

Can you sketch your reasoning behind these claims? And put forth the most common criticisms against virtue ethics, and defend your position against these criticisms? I don't agree with you, but you have not given me a sufficiently tight argument to convince me or take issue with.

roxolotl2• 10 months ago

Utilitarianism has two issues. The first is the utility monster which is a classic criticism that boils down to "what if there was something which gains infinite utility from the suffering of others". I think it's a rather weak criticism however it is currently what the AI/Crypto effective altruists have almost fully given in to. They argue utter destruction of humanity by an AI is a reason you should donate all your time and money to AI safety research. But the more useful criticism is that it's too simple to actually model reality and leads to an economic approach to ethics. This is what leads to a primacy of the bureaucratic state. It becomes a moral imperative to gather as much information as possible to enable the state to maximize utility. The best example of this is that Brave New World is a utilitarian utopia.

Deontology is answered by the parent article. Most deontological frameworks are defined as correct in and of themselves. If you genuinely believe in one you're likely a moral individual by other definitions so that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Virtue Ethics is commonly criticized as not being normative enough, it doesn't really tell you explicitly how to act it instead tells you what a good person looks like, and too complex so at to be actually useful, the definition of virtues aren't simple. I like Hursthouse's defense and formation of it in her paper on Abortion[0][1]. It boils down the the criticisms being the reason that it's a useful theory. I like these two points she makes:

"Second, the theory is not trivially circular;it does not specify right action in terms of the virtuous agent and then immediately specify the virtuous agent in terms of right action. Rather,it specifies her in terms of the virtues, and then specifies these, not merely as dispositions to right action, but as the character traits(which are dispositions to feel and react as well as act in certain ways) required for eudaimonia"

"Third, it does answer the question "What should I do?"as well as the question "What sort of person should I be?" (That is, it is not, as one of the catchphrases has it, concerned only with Being and not with Doing.)"

In short the theory isn't trivial, unlike utilitarianism which can easily fall victim to being over trivialized as shown by today's AI effective altruists and utopias like Brave New World, and it provides answers to both what you should do and who you should be, unlike deontology which just answers what you should do. I like this paper because it makes a genuinely unique case for the ethics of abortion. She argues that you can both grant personhood to a fetus, or more accurately that personhood is irrelevant, and still ethically justify many abortions.

That likely is too nuanced for today's discourse but that's the point. As we've moved to either utilitarianism or deontology as the driving motivation behind our moral actions we've over simplified the world.

Anyways hope that's interesting, helpful and provides some insights into my thought.

[0]: stable jstor source https://www.jstor.org/stable/2265432?origin=JSTOR-pdf [1]: free pdf which may or may not go away https://eclass.uoa.gr/modules/document/file.php/PPP504/Hurst...

PeterWhittaker• 10 months ago

Nihilism appeals because the root causes are oligarchy and kleptocracy: when you realize you are powerless in the large, the only real alternatives are disengagement and violence in the small. Why violence? In this context, it is the only thing guaranteed to leave a mark.

The third alternative, the difficult way, is social engagement on a path to social democracy, to limiting the reach of autocrats and robber barons, and to defetishizing the first two amendments.

But that path requires lifting one's eyes, abandoning one's out groups, working with all, and foregoing at least some comfort and self advantage.

It is the only way. I doubt I will see it (entered 7th decade recently, feel pretty confident about that).

GeoAtreides• 10 months ago

Why is this very interesting post about the philosophy of nihilism and empty rituals flagged?

Returning to Church won't save us from nihilism

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