Understanding the Left's Secutar Religion

Radio host Dennis Prager, author of The Rational Bible, proposes that the left's worship of nature is a return to the old religion. Quoting G.K. Chesterton, he writes

"When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing; they believe in anything." 

One of these substitute gods has been nature. 

Indeed, of all the false gods, nature is probably the most natural for people to worship. Every religion prior to the Bible had nature-gods -- the sun, the moon, the sea, gods of fertility, gods of rain and so on. 

That is why the farther Western society gets from biblical, i.e., Judeo-Christian, religions, the more nature is worshipped.

And, of course, this new religion has adopted all the trappings of the old. He quotes Ross Douthat at The New York Times,

"The threat of global warming, meanwhile, has lent the cult of Nature qualities that every successful religion needs: a crusading spirit, a rigorous set of 'thou shalt nots,' and a piping-hot apocalypse."

But I take a different tack, which you may accept or not, as you wish. And, of course, my tack is informed by my reductive Three Peoples theory, and its adjunct, the notion of what religions the Three Peoples believe in. I set out the following notions:

The God of the People of the Subordinate Self is the great lord or patron.

The Subordinate does not experience the possibility that his actions may make a difference. He is like the Achaeans before the walls of Troy, whose battles were completely determined by the Olympian gods. He doesn't pretend to know how the world works; he just submits to the power of his lords and gods.

Compare that with the God of Responsibles.

The God of the People of the Responsible Self is the abstract, though personal, God of the Axial Age religions... The problem for humans is no longer to submit to the actual power and might of the ruler, but to submit to the abstract rules of the Law.

The Responsible still does not understand how the world works, but he acts on the general principles of God's Divine Law in the faith that such action will be successful.

But the world of the Creative is different.

The God of the People of the Creative Self is the Creative Self. If the old God was the creator of the universe, or at least in on the design, the modern creative self aims to become as God. The nature and the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is not a mystery known only to God, but a Gordian Knot that creative man himself is unraveling and will eventually master. That is why our modern ruling class is full of plans for improvement and bending the arc of history towards justice. Society is, for them, a creative project.

The point is that in the modern age since the scientific revolution mankind has come to believe that he can understand the world enough to make a difference. It is no longer a question of following orders from the Olympican gods or following the Divine Law of the Axial Age God. The world seems to be understandable. That is why, as Prager notes,

When you ask atheists, as I have for decades, what they believe in, the most common answer is "science."

The point is that, if you believe in science, you believe that humans can make a difference through improving their understanding of science, or "how the world works."

And "we" all believe this, these days.

The question is, of course, whether human knowledge should be a social project, of humans in social cooperation, or a political project, deploying science with force.

The basic fault line between Right and Left, I would say, is the question of force. Shall we use science to enact a forced march to the future? Or shall we let the natural social cooperation of humans, informed by experiment -- and most important of all by mistakes -- to illuminate the future.

Yes. The $64,000 question. Shall we lordly rulers permit our underlings to make mistakes? In my view we humans advance to the future over the rubble of our mistakes.

Now it is my belief that the left's faith in political force represents a return to the past. Because I think that the whole principle of all social animals is the principle of the reduction in force.

You see this in the present Chinese Virus epidemic. Our lefty friends are horrified by the off-the-cuff remark by President Trump about the encouraging prospect of (hydroxy)chloroquine. Where was the FDA approval? Where were the double-blind studies? Where was the protocol?

And CNN journalist Jake Tapper just asked President Trump about the return to normal: "What's the plan?" In that he echoes Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) who campaigned on the theme of "my plan is..."

Well, it was the Prussian general von Moltke that said "No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy." He meant that, once the battle starts, everyone from the general in charge to the lowliest subultern is going to have to improvise and react to the changing conditions on the ground.

Do you understand what that means, Jake Tapper? It means that now, six weeks into the Corona War, the plan, if there was one, is dead and buried. All the administrative state procedures and chains of command and expert advice are there only to enforce "settled science" and medical knowledge. But when the war starts all that safe-spaces stuff goes out the window. Because we are now all guinea pigs, and nobody knows what will work.

The perfect example is the AIDS epidemic. Gay AIDS activists did a remarkable job putting pressure on the medical and administrative hierarchy to permit the use of experimental drugs on AIDS patients. Because when you are under a death sentence, you are not worried about double-blind studies and administrative regulations. You are willing to be a human guinea pig and try anything that might save your life.

So I don't think that our secular religious friends are going back to the past with their nature religion. Of course Nature is amazing. Indeed the more we learn about Nature the more we are amazed.

My problem with our secular religious friends is the return to force, the idea that we know all we need to know and here is The Plan. Or else.

And that's why I call the left a Great Reaction.