religion versus the world
In my view, religion is a technology of government.
My view? Within the framework of the worlding urge, that much of our institutions are things we have met with and made, are the outcomes of that which moves us to should among and on others. It is why we should, the basic assumption of this blog.I say that with the haziness all anarchists have when dealing with either as a subject alone. But they are strongly interrelated because Homo sapiens are human because they have meetings (mostly about their relationships with regard to cross-insurance).
I used to say ‘technology of state’, and I am likely to say a ‘technology of empire’ more and more. That meta-growth which seek to rule various governments, with a strong predilection for one oneness to rule them all because it simplifies things for lazy brains.
Religion has been a key method of ruling the world. Religions are co-developments of the state (city, kingdom empire). They need each other and they hate that co-dependency.
As a technology of government (the softest definition) we can accommodate its interference in the social arena of life more easily. Certainly a separation of church and state in recent centuries has fostered the common ground of our biases when we move to a place of toleration, if not creativity, in insuring engagement with those we bicker with in the noyaux of being alive.
The problem with all this, [even in the rational liberal and reasonable compromise we have put up with recently, in the name of progress or enlightenment (which are also outcomes of the worlding urge] is that the world does not exist outside of the wheels in kept in mind, (that' a Stirner reference) if not mindfulness (that's a Buddhist-ish reference with a nod to Pyrrhonism).
In religion, we have organized a technology of control which has no subject, or rather, objectively, has no sense of just how frail the subjectivity is. We have set up surveillance cameras which watch that nothingness of our selves in the world. We call that identity, loyalty, anything but the relationships web us into networks and conflict. This is how we solve problems, it is how problems arise. (Loyalty is a type of slave morality, see below.)
Even before the separation of church and state was invented, religions had gone rogue. The Catholic Church is a Byzantine government department that went rogue so long ago, and so foundational to Western Europe, that we fail to see it's attempt to rule by Empire and by local software updates via parishes, as a desire to submit all government to religion. A curse upon our agreements, a canker upon our souls, (which also do not exist).
More recently there is a very American version of this desire for union and thus control of government.
As technology of government, religion has lead now to some stupid if not mindless outcomes, where technology itself provides the basis of a ‘religion', both in practice and in dogma. And technology literally literally, and not used as a metaphor of state control nor more softly, in routine (ritual) socialisation.
(And no this is not about Elon Musk's dubious ancestry in a Technocracy cult.)
Anthony Levandowski set out to establish a new religion. He called it the Way of the Future – or WOTF. According to documents filed with the state of California at the time, the aim of WOTF was to “develop and promote the realisation of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence”. from Technology will never be a god – but has it become a religion?
If god does not exist then we must make him? In our own image? I am pretty sure we have always done that. Nothing to see here. (Most recently just look up the history of Futurism; the self-idolatry is taken to extremely lazy levels of excitement.)
To become god. To take what the polis offers, but not to believe in it, but to try to enact it within one’s own life, one’s own ego, and if one must compromise and put up with the fact that others even exist, then some sort of hierarchy for the slaves will do. True slave morality is a morality (worldbuilding effort) of the slaver. Don’t want a slave morality or ressentiment, then destroy the slavers. Police the narcissists.
What is left is already there.
Of course in the recent centuries of big history, with the splintering of the marketplace of ideas [within the recent context of a separation of church and state] religion is just another package deal, so the stupidities are not existential, but diffused and incoherent. Where the danger lies is in weak character being driven by strong feelings that can pool these ressentiments together into a moment of self-deception and self-fulfilling paranoia.
Some strong feelings seek to remove the weak character, but in doing so turn themselves into simp-chads of emotional laziness and models of self-indulgence, running amok.
They are also stupid, despite their intelligence, because strong feelings do not lead us into worlding well despite our differences.
The stupid cannot abide difference, it reminds them of the frailty they despise, the hatred they have embodied and called a core strength. Making a virtue of their failure.
Because it is lonely at the top, they are alone with their problems and like incels with a loaded gun, seek no problem-solving with others in the world, and want everyone to be alone, in their cells, as borg-like monks worshipping something not even efficient, not even perfect, but nailed down and inconsequential. Some of them want to freely express themselves about this on you and yours, you weaklings.
Crossposted at whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com
Nice post. You might like Emile Durkheim's "The Elementary Forms of Religious Life" -- it's long but big sections are skimmable, or you can just go find some summaries online. But in short he goes further and deeper than what you are saying. Religion certainly predates the state (which couln't really exist before writing). He ties religious origins to tribes and their totems and, to make a long story short, ends up with something like "religion is society worshipping itself." I'm very partial to that hypothesis myself, and thinking of big historical trends like you are doing in this post through that lens is very useful (it seems to me).