Myth and Religion in an Age of Science

I sent a piece to American Thinker last night to urge that we reclassify all lefty ideologies as religions. The idea was to be able to apply the First Amendment to our lefty friends respecting establishments of religion.

Because if the US has an official religion right now it is the congeries of lefty ideologies, and don't you dare question the experts on their political correctness.

However, I was also reading Jordan B. Peterson yesterday, and he says this about your modern ideologies. And he means all of them, from the story of "benevolent nature threatened by the rapacious forces of the corrupt individual and the society of the machine" to the brave pioneer "wresting the good life... from the intransigent forces of nature."

These stories are all ideologies... [But they] are dangerous. Their power stems from their incomplete but effective appropriation of mythical ideas... Ideologies only tell part of the story, but tell that part as if it were complete.

Peterson wants us to understand that everything is two-edged. Benevolent nature? Yes, but it includes malarial mosquitos. Noble pioneers? But what about the original inhabitants? The Great Mother is creation and destruction. The Great Father is security and tyranny, and if your appropriated myth doesn't weave that into the story then, in the words of Mary McCarthy, every word is a lie, including "and" and "the."

Yes, but isn't myth and religion old hat, because science? Well, I quoted Rodney Stark in my AT piece to the effect that

The everlasting basis for religion will be the human conviction and hope that life has meaning.

Or, as I like to quote from Douglas Adams, it is all about "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything." I think the point is that the reason that all living things do what they do is that they act as if their life has hope and meaning. Maybe there is no meaning of life in this universe. But it seems to me that everything in the universe seems to be acting as if there is. Or, to put it in terms of Jordan Peterson, our lives are based on affect, responding to unexpected stimuli with the response we call "emotion."

I see that he gets some of this from Nietzsche. I am reading Beyond Good and Evil at the gym and Nietzsche is pretty clear on science, philosophy, and everything. Kant and his categories? Sure, but suppose he was mistaken? Schopenhauer and his "will?" So let's unpack it:  the fact is that "will" is not something simple and certain, but complicated unit into which a whole world of meaning has been packed. Cause and effect? We should use them "as conventional fictions for the purpose of designation and communication -- not for explanation." Or,

It is perhaps just dawning on five or six minds that physics, too, is only an interpretation and exegesis of the world (to suit us, if I may say so!) and not a world explanation[.]

That is to say that science demonstrates the world; it does not explain it.

Actually I think the whole thing can be understood by turning Marx on his head. In his Theses on Feuerbach he famously writes:

Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.

Er, no Chuck. Let's look at this from the Peterson point of view. We achieve new interpretations of the world from experiencing the unexpected as an irruption of the dangerous unknown. There is a whole universe out there of which we know nothing, because it does not affect our lives. But when the universe whacks us upside the head we struggle to achieve a hard-won new interpretation the world. The point is not to change the world but to change  ourselves so we can better continue our lives in a less dangerous and more effective way.

Going along in the old way and ignoring new interpretations of the world may be sensible, or it may be suffocating. Going off in a new way may be beneficial, or it may be suicidal.

Changing the world, Chuck, might be the point or it might be a recipe for 100 million dead humans.

The point is to figure out the difference. And that is the job of myth and religion, not science, and not half-baked lefty ideology.