I. Truth vs Myth
I’ve recently been thinking on the social, personal, and spiritual benefits of religion, and have been struggling to reconcile the apparently godless and material nature of our host universe with the metaphysical claims of Christianity. In this exercise I have been developing my thinking towards something that could underpin a sane religion, if Christianity could not be salvaged. I’d like to here give a brief snapshot of my current theological framework in the hopes that it will be useful.
A few axioms to begin with. These form the bedrock of my current worldview. If they are wrong, I should like to hear about it, but I’ll refrain from arguing them here:
- Materialism. The universe is well modelled by an unknown but computable mathematical object akin in some ways to a mathematical series, a cellular automaton, a fractal, etc. An object of vast complexity that grows from a relatively simple defining Law. We find ourselves manifested as patterns within this construction.
- Sanctity of Truth. It is critical that the accurate perception of reality not be subordinate to other values. We shall not adopt beliefs about the material world for their projected effects, palatability, or political correctness.
- Post-Nihilism. Nihilism is the observation that material universes do not contain anything of spiritual value or moral authority, and thus that accurate perceptions of reality do not contain beliefs about spiritual narrative. But it is also the case that wholesale nihilism is a non-solution, and that humans must live within a believable spiritual narrative or mythos.
The third axiom, in commanding the existence of a believable mythos in contradiction to the nonexistence of true myths implied by the first two axioms, gives us our problem.
The immediate and obvious solution is that we must believe in a mythology that is not true. Not necessarily false, mind you; our spiritual myths may be nonsense from a truth perspective. For example, we might claim to believe that “It is the destiny of mankind to conquer the stars”. This can’t really be true or false in a positivist sense because constructions involving “destiny” and “mankind” are not really meaningful empirically. How does the statement constrain your expectations? It does not; it is purely mythological.
You may have noticed the relationship of this problem to Hume’s impenetrable Is-Ought barrier. I propose a similarly impenetrable but transparent Truth-Myth barrier to replace it. On one side we have the beliefs one adopts as part of an unsubordinated quest to understand the world, the beliefs that an idealized engineer might have, the Truth. On the other side we have those beliefs that provide meaning and spiritual context, and motivate us, the Myth. I call the barrier transparent because the Myth tends to be constructed in terms of the Truth. For example where on the truth side we notice fleshy ape-things that are related in a certain way to most of what we have to deal with, on the Myth side we call them “people”, give them individual names, and speculate about their destiny. On the Truth side of the barrier, I think Logical Positivism is the correct approach; we construct our beliefs about Truth to constrain our expectations and direct our purposeful actions, and we cut out the non-contributing parts. On the Myth side, I don’t really know how or even whether we ought to constrain our techniques of reasoning. I will be relatively permissive here and take the position that you adopt whatever mythology speaks to your soul, with the only restriction being that don’t let this pollute our understanding of Truth.
I’d like to briefly develop some of my beliefs on each side of the Truth-Myth framework. This may diverge from other’s judgements of reality and value, but it should at least be illustrative of how I mean this framework to be applied. Hopefully it also serves as a useful set of insights on practical spirituality for others who may be in the position I have been for the past while.
II. Gnon
From one of Yudkowsky’s Best:
A human being, looking at the natural world, sees a thousand times purpose. A rabbit’s legs, built and articulated for running; a fox’s jaws, built and articulated for tearing. But what you see is not exactly what is there…
In the days before Darwin, [God did it] seemed like a much more reasonable hypothesis. Find a watch in the desert, said William Paley, and you can infer the existence of a watchmaker.
But when you look at all the apparent purposefulness in Nature, rather than picking and choosing your examples, you start to notice things that don’t fit the Judeo-Christian concept of one benevolent God. Foxes seem well-designed to catch rabbits. Rabbits seem well-designed to evade foxes.
Indeed, we find a watch, and infer a watchmaker. But what a watch it is, and what a watchmaker it implies; clearly designed, but not for any apparent external purpose besides perhaps existence itself, with many internal “contradictions” in apparent goals. As we know now, the theory of evolution reveals the mechanism of design, and thus locally resolves the mystery as far as Truth is concerned, but Myth is unsatisfied, having lost the Truthful basis for its great source of moral lawgiving, and perhaps there are a few other loose ends:
On looking around further, we notice Capitalism, Natural Law, Military Conquest, Memetics, Intelligence, and the nigh-teleological progress from lesser to more powerful creative processes itself, operating under a similar regime of semi-Darwinistic optimization by iterated generation vs culling. Details vary, but the outlines of the idea, and, were I a mathematician I would be able to say, many theorems, are shared across all particular instances of this general creative and lawgiving process.
Looking further afield still, as Stephen Wolfram did with his Cellular Automata experiments in NKS, at the set of all possible material universes, we find a small subset at the thin and uncertain boundary between trivial computation and pseudorandom chaos where this creative process might be able to manifest itself to create the kind of ordered complexity we find ourselves a part of. And thus by the anthropic principle and selection over a field of existing mathematical constructs we find that this general creative process would almost seem to explain the finely tuned nature of Creation itself.
Noticing even a subset of these things, the creative process in question becomes a Thing of significant interest, deserving to be named. Remaining agnostic as to its metaphysical nature, and seeking only to comment on its direct consequences, we call it Nature or Nature’s God. But once named, and especially once shortened to the pseudo-acryonym “Gnon”, the mythologizing begins to fill in the aesthetic flourishes:
Gnon gives life to those forms It deems worthy, and Gnon indifferently wipes out those forms that violate Its Law. Gnon seems to have a plan of increasingly powerful and intricate forms engaging in a campaign of conquest across the universe, and if Man can organize himself to stay on the good side of the Law, it may be us riding that teleological wave, rather than our unleashed machine shoggoths or some distant challenger of the Great Filter. One should not worship Gnon, whose cosmic schemes look decidedly unfriendly, but nor can one get away with ignorance or rebellion.
As a myth and cognitive tool for thinking about the nature of the universe and our position therein, the omnipresent, creative, and authoritative, but morally grey and utterly indifferent Gnon seems superior to the others I have heard of. It has the right mix of truth, Lovecraftian horror, and moral authority to force us out of the doomed complacency of naive cuddle piles or smug Cassandraism, and offer us real guidance.
III. Small Gods and Spiritual Crises
In terms of positivist Truth, there is no meaning to concepts such as consciousness, souls, identity, rights, dignity, well-being, or any of that, and yet, when relating to the other meat-things around ourselves, we often reason using or implicitly relying on these concepts. In terms of our Truth-Myth framework developed above, these concepts are myths that guide our understanding of how to relate to the world. A friend of mine summarizes it thus:
People anthropomorphize people too much.
There is nothing wrong with this, it is a fact about our psychology that we relate to the world through non-factual stories and mythology in this way. Recognizing it, deconstructing it, and then reconstructing it in the present framework leads in some interesting directions with respect to anthropomorphizing and mythologizing in general:
In the world around us, there are many important processes besides individual people that we must relate to. Many of the old gods, those of natural processes like weather, fertility, home, war, the land, and so on, can be understood as myths around these processes that allowed our ancestors to relate to them in a natural spiritual way. We no longer live or think the same way as them, and their particular gods don’t speak to us, but we can’t pretend to have cast off all gods: Civilization, Progress, Democracy, Social Justice, Santa Claus.
Many of us react against some of the predominant gods of the day, as our enemies reacted against the gods of their days, calling them false, calling their worship harmful and antisocial, and so on. It is important to have a nuanced view of the theological nature of such conflicts. It is not that we claim these gods do not exist – anyone who wants to claim that Democracy et al are not profoundly real and powerful sociopsychological entities with significant basis in reality, has an awful lot of work to do – what we claim is that their cultists base their worship on mistakes of reasoning on the Truth side about the nature of their gods. For example they believe that the worship rituals and patterns of spiritual relation around Democracy will bring peace, order, and good government, when in fact those rituals may only bring slow ruin.
It’s clear looking at history that our mythologies change as we change our lifestyles and our understanding of the world. Gods and myths go in and out of relevance, fashion, and good regard. This is nothing to be alarmed at on it’s own once we drop belief in a universalistic One True Faith. Sometimes these changes are simply natural adjustment to changing realities, sometimes well engineered interventions against pathology, and sometimes evil or misguided attempts to exterminate a healthy culture.
In many ways it has become clear that ethnic Europeans are facing a spiritual crisis that threatens to tear our civilization apart. For whatever reason, be it the poisonous influence of traitors and outsiders, broad cultural war between our factions, the slow metastasization of centuries old geopolitical mistakes, or the natural cycle of empires, our current dominant spirituality, in the forms of social justice activism, ungrounded consumeristic greed, telescopic altruism, libertine hedonism, and so on, seems to have little to do with a healthy and balanced domestic and civic lifestyle, and quite a bit to do with ritual self-destruction.
The shape of our spiritual crisis is not that we do or don’t worship gods, or that we worship false gods, but that we worship terrible demon gods that demand the sacrifice of our people, culture, and civilization. A healthy mythos would instead be a quiet but lively human-allied tradition offering us positive guidance, spiritual context, and purpose in our lives. Such things have existed in our past, and perhaps we can weather this and move towards spiritual health again in our future.
I will name some of what I think are the healthiest and most moving mythologies currently living, out of which a spiritual restoration could be made. As with all good things, these are all under attack by the enemy:
- Science Fiction is a big obvious mythology, offering glorious visions of mankind growing up, conquering the stars, and dealing with various questions of existential importance. It is quite influential among the most productive members of our society (eg Elon Musk).
- The mythology around masculinity has seen a bit of a restoration in certain corners of the Internet, which has been quite good overall. The masculinity literature certainly has its bad parts where it focuses too much on hedonism at the expense of other values, but it is overall vastly better than the degenerate vision of masculinity pushed by the limp-wristed twinks and barren harpies of the mainstream.
- Explicit ethnic pride is decidedly out of fashion among europeans, but has been growing recently. Ethnic pride is as utterly necessary to the preservation of a people and culture against dissolution as the cell membrane is to the preservation of our microscopic cousins; a people that fails to positively mythologize its own existence doesn’t last very long.
- Our living domestic and civic traditions like our solstice, christmas, halloween, thanksgiving, etc festivals; marriage and family traditions; local food and sustainable lifestyles; the western literary and musical canon; various forms of dance and other community activity; etc. strike me as quite healthy and in need of defence and emphasis.
I will hopefully be developing and commenting further on these and other mythologies in the future.
You’ll notice that this mode of theological reasoning is quite alien to the situation in semitic monotheism and Atheism, where mythologies are argued for and against by their truth value rather than by their compatibility with healthy life or appeal to one’s soul. I regard that pattern of reasoning to be in error; truth and myth are of a different kind and ought not to be confused. It is interesting and surprising to me that I have come to regard a sort of animistic polytheism (that described here) as fully compatible with sanity and rationality.
IV. Ancestors and Traditions
In my adventures, I have made many stupid mistakes. Most of the deliberately made ones, it turns out, were in the form of neglecting tradition. I have not had any big wins by breaking with tradition.
I am reluctant to discuss the embarrassing details, but the general pattern that occurred more than once is that some fashionable young progressives would come with persuasive arguments for a radically anti-traditional lifestyle choice. I typically had misgivings about the choice, but peer pressure and buzzwords like “rationality” and “effectiveness” would win me over. Of course they were all terrible mistakes and I lost plenty of time, money, friends, and psychological well being. Oops.
In every case, I could have avoided the mistake by placing more mythological significance in what was traditional and what my ancestors would think. These are not things I wish I’d thought of, they are things I did think of, but discarded as irrelevant. It is not a far-fetched inference that such a mythology would have done me well. Socialization into a traditionalist mythology would have acted as a sort of memetic immune system, preventing infection by various virulent insanities.
It turns out there is a great deal of wisdom in a tradition, it having worked for most people over a broad enough period of time to be considered well proven. People try all kinds of silly things, and the ones that work get repeated and ingrained in the culture, and the ones that don’t get forgotten or become mythically bad ideas. By this process of slow cultural accretion by trial and error (ie divine revelation from Gnon), we can come to know complex things in the form of traditions that cannot always be immediately or even ever explained.
There was a time when I did not regard “It’s a tradition!” as a serious argument for a piece of social technology or personal conduct, but I now pause and take that argument quite seriously when something I’m doing can be interpreted as breaking with tradition.
I find that a good heuristic for traditional-ness is asking yourself whether your ancestors would approve. Would you tell your dad? Your grandfather? When you arrive in the hall of your ancestors after death, and they say “son, we saw everything”, do you say “oh, fuck”?
Purely rational arguments about tradition may not motivate anyone who is likely to have problems on this point, but a sort of mythological traditionalism and reverence for one’s ancestors may be more accessible and transmissible to those who need it. I certainly find the more mythological formulation of this argument much more practically compelling to myself than the rational arguments which back it up.
I think this concept of social technology being held together by mythology is an important one. When we describe the benefits and workings of a piece of social technology, that can certainly help to design, understand, and select it, but the actual substance of its implementation seems to be the mythology. I now make an effort to mythologize to myself the social technologies of my ancestors and those I encounter in my own study.
V. Paganism
In doing these experiments in post-rationalist religion, I poked around looking for sources of insight in existing religious work. One thing I found surprising was the extent to which my intuitions matched Germanic Paganism (Asatru) as described by the right-wing pagans on 8chan. I won’t pretend to be a pagan scholar, or to be in any position to really criticize their beliefs, but I thought I ought to give some brief speculation on the relationship between that view and this.
The view that a certain shape of myths and practices subtly persist despite centuries of attempted christianity, that these myths and practices form a pagan religion baked so deeply into the northwest european soul that it goes beyond what we merely believe and do, to what we are, is very appealing to me. That particular myth, seeming historically accurate enough for our purposes, I gladly incorporate into my mythology.
To the extent that germanic paganism currently exists as a living tradition, it seems, from what I know, fully compatible with what I’ve laid out here. Indeed, I have deliberately emphasized the parts of this formulation that seem the most pagan in form or origin. They even have some suspiciously Gnon-like notions.
My major concern with the sort of paleopaganism (or neopaganism and other traditionalisms for that matter) of the sort that people reflexively grope for on considering these matters, is that it seems to be attempting mythological necromancy. I don’t think you actually can study an ancient tradition without a living community and then resurrect anything but a cheap imitation. I do think you can peer into the soul of your people, draw significant insight (but not power) from wide, including dead, sources, and gather lingering influences and bits of living tradition together with some new construction to build something living and strong. This is what I’ve attempted here.
We also live in a civilized post-industrial society, and the mythology and gods of old-style paganism as I understand it were optimized for a more uncivilized agrarian society. We could do with more of our ancestral stories in the cultural canon, and I think we ought to be more in tune with the land and more often self sufficient in traditional ways than we are, but we should expect a version of our inherent religion optimized for the kind of spiritually enlightened civilization in which we wish to live to be quite a bit different from what our ancestors had before the christians came and civilized us.
So I view my experiments here as an attempt toward a modern sort of paganism that carries on the spirit of our ancestral traditions while being relevant to our current technological position and able to carry us up and to the right into the future. It’s nowhere near complete, but I hope it’s a good start.